Volume 2, Number 12 · July 30, 1964
Fruits de Mer
By Roger Shattuck
The Oysters of Locmariaquer
by Eleanor Clark. drawings by Leonid
Pantheon, 203 pp., $4.95
Now that we have accepted our senses again as the broad and winding path to life itself, we still puzzle our poor heads over which ones to trust and which to dismiss. Just how much does seeing, for instance, penetrate our sensuous and moral universe? Or how much do things merely viewed block us forever short of a complete experience of the object? A few neo-Freudian critic-philosophers worry seriously over it. They tell us that the faculty of vision has usurped our sensory system, because it equips us to discriminate 'that thing out there.' Painting refines the visual organs and tends to eliminate the need to hold and to heft. We look only, and refrain from touching. Hearing follows close behind sight as the other take-over faculty. The rest of our senses are going to rack and ruin, and we should all look to our bodies before we lose them. It's something to think about.
Review, 1793 words
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