Abram’s first book and the argument the rest of his work rests on. He apprenticed himself to traditional healers in Indonesia and Nepal, expecting to talk about magic, and found their real work was keeping relations square with the land. Then he asks the question the book turns on: What happened to us? His answer is the alphabet. Older writing systems kept pictures of the world in them, and the phonetic alphabet cut that cord, so letters came to refer only to human sounds and the world went quiet. He runs it through phenomenology without making you suffer, and the passages on being outdoors after all that thinking are the payoff.
The Spell of the Sensuous