a century later. Originally from Buffalo, NY, he received a BS in Cinema & Photography from Ithaca College and an MFA from Emerson College where he served as fiction editor for the literary journal Redivider. His work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Harvard Review, and West Branch. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.
At Electric Lit Kerns tagged seven "books that engage with animals in different ways, probing their behaviors and our relationship to them, our sympathies for and atrocities against them." One title on the list:
An Immense World by Ed YongRead about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.
Of all the books on this list, Ed Yong’s exploration of animals’ senses brings me closest to the experience of communicating with them. Yong begins by imagining ahuman joining an elephant, mouse, robin, owl, bat, rattlesnake, spider, and mosquito in a room, and then describes the sensory experience of each animal. While all occupy the same space, their individual experiences highlight the different ways in which they sense an environment and alter our understanding of how they might feel.
An important distinction Yong makes concerning what we understand and don’t understand about animals’ behavior and senses is that while we may be able to discover, biologically, how an animal “reacts to what it senses,” we don’t know “how it feels.” In the chapter on “Pain,” Yong writes: “Imagine your entire body became delicate to the touch whenever you stubbed your toe: That’s a squid’s reality.”
For anyone seeking a better understanding of how animals experience the world—not how we experience animals in a vast network of ecologies making up a world that we think belongs to us but how they might feel—I can’t recommend An Immense World enough. It’s a wondrous journey.
--Marshal Zeringue
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