[b]Diane Ackerman
Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can’t really predict success, let alone satisfaction.[/b]
Come on, they do what they are designed to do. Whatever that is.
And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can’t really share the enormity of our lives.
Right, like we can with them.
We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?
Hate maybe?
In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.
So, does that settle it?
To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.
Of course we try to do lots of things.
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points.
And then one day they don’t.
In, for example, divorce court.