As If Reading a Map
When I hold an orange in my hand, I feel a certain weight, a faint give in the skin, a coolness. At the very moment my head thinks “this is an orange,” my hand, too, knows it for one.
A baby doesn’t work this way. Whatever it grasps, it brings first to its mouth—licking, biting, making sure. It looks a little strange, but there’s a reason for it. In the earliest days, the lips and tongue are the most finely tuned organs of touch, and the first to mature. At an age when the eyes can’t yet make out depth, a baby feels the thickness of a thing, the roundness of its corners, with the mouth. The ability to read fine texture with the hands comes in a little later. And so the first organ we use to make sure of what’s in front of us is not the hand, but the mouth.
The baby doesn’t know that the orange is an “orange.” It knows neither its name nor that it’s food. By actually touching it, actually putting it in the mouth, it is building a dictionary, one sensation at a time. To know was, before anything else, for the body to touch the world. Much later, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty placed knowing not in the head, but here, on the side of the body.
As the hands develop, the work of making sure moves from mouth to hand. No longer does everything go into the mouth; a grip is enough to tell. And once we’re grown, we leave out more still, coming to know by sight alone. Without picking it up, the instant we see an orange, its weight, the feel of its skin, its sourness—we already feel we “know” them.
But in that moment we aren’t really feeling anything. The brain is only calling up the memory of having touched and tasted, many times before. Once a template forms—”an orange is this kind of thing”—the brain stops checking with every sense each time. It uses only the fastest, easiest sense, vision, and fills in the rest from memory. That we can feel we’ve understood at a glance is thanks to this leaving-out.
We are creatures that lean heavily on sight; a wide part of the brain is given over to seeing. A dog goes on checking the world by smell, a rat by its whiskers. We don’t go that far. We settle it by looking, or finish it off by name. If you know the single word “orange,” you no longer touch it or smell it—the word alone is enough. Knowing, which began with the mouth touching and making sure, comes to be completed by what the eyes take in and by that sign we call a name. It’s less like recognizing a photograph, and more like reading a symbol on a map.
This is an efficient way to go about things. If, even as adults, we put everything in our mouths or handled it to make sure, the pace of life would slow to a crawl. It’s precisely because we can leave things out that we can handle what’s in front of us at the pace we do. By taking so much of the world as signs, perhaps, we are saving time.