The new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Bookshop|Amazon) delightfully combines scientific writing with a literary sensibility and a gift for vivid similes. It’s by Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. The book’s title is derived from lines by poet William Blake: How do you know but every bird / that cuts the airy way / Is an immense world of delight, / closed by your senses five? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “”Every Bird That Cuts the Airy Way””
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Earlier, I mentioned the wonderful book by Ed Young called An Immense World, how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. And it’s about how there are lots of ways that animals perceive the world, a lot of different ways, depending on what kind of sensory apparatus they have. For example, a dog’s nose is far, far more sensitive than our own.
And a bee can see ultraviolet light.
And a catfish has taste buds all over its body.
And I wanted to share just one quick example of Young’s writing. He writes about scallops and their optic systems and a scientist who studies them. And he writes, Daniel Spicer never thought he would spend his career trying to empathize with scallops. When he started graduate school in 2004, he thought about them the same way most people do, as lumps of meat on a plate.
But those appetizing pan-seared lumps are merely the muscles that scallops use to close their shells. Look at a full living scallop, and you’ll see a very different animal. And that animal will see you too.
And he says the question of why they have so many eyes is still a bit of a mystery, because most of the time, scallops just sit there on the sea floor. But he writes, when scallops are threatened, they can swim away, opening and closing their shells like panicked castanets.
Isn’t that fantastic? What a description. That’s exactly right. Panicked castanets. I just love that the book is full of these kinds of analogies. And again, as I said, it’s really science with a literary sensibility.
In fact, the title itself refers to lines from William Blake. When he’s writing about the limitations of our own senses. Blake wrote, how do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five.
In other words, how much more could we see if we just expand our perception? So the book, again, is An Immense World by Ed Young. We’ll link to that on the website.
We’d love to hear what you’re reading, and we’d love to hear, even if it’s not about language, we’re just appreciative, like you are, of stuff that is written wonderfully. What beautiful things have you read lately?
Let us know, words@waywordradio.org, or tell us about the author and the book on Twitter @wayword.
