A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES

By Diane Ackerman.

placed a large Indonesian flying fox in my hair, to see if it would get

entangled, as the old wives' tales warned. Not only did it not tangle, it began
to cough gently from the mingling smells of my soap, cologne, saltiness, oils,
and other human odors.'' This quotation captures perfectly the mood of ''A
Natural History of the Senses'' by Diane Ackerman. The scene is both
interesting and excessive, as the book itself is.

What the passage shows is Ms. Ackerman's willingness to use herself as a

medium. To borrow a phrase from Allen Ginsberg, she is a ''great
experiencer,'' and she is eager to share her experiences with us. Like a
marriage counselor bringing a separated husband and wife back together, she
proposes to reintroduce us to our neglected senses. It's a valuable project, and
for the most part she does it well. Her book is rather like an ecology of the
body. It fairly buzzes with information.

A poet, a nature writer and the author of ''On Extended Wings,'' a memoir
about flying, Ms. Ackerman is an athlete of the senses. ''Life,'' she writes,
''showers over everything, radiant, gushing,'' and so does she. ''We live on the
leash of our senses,'' she says. They ''define the edges of consciousness.'' Yet
we haven't treated these voluptuous faculties of ours very well. It seems to be
the essence of the modern attitude to distrust the natural, even as we proclaim
it. Our senses are callused, covered with the scar tissue of our sophistication.
There is a tendency now to condescend to nature. As Marshall McLuhan said,
we've begun to prefer artificiality.

To think our way back into feeling: this is Ms. Ackerman's mission, and she's
very persuasive. On every other page, there's a nice apercu: breath is ''cooked
air''; perfume is ''liquid memory''; when astronauts are weightless in their
spaceship, they lose their sense of smell; the sweat of schizophrenics smells
different from ours; a kiss is like singing into someone's mouth; in a
Stradivarius violin, the wood ''remembers'' its past performances.

She has very good taste in quotation, too: a musical chord ''is something like
an idea . . . an audible idea'' (Victor Zuckerkandl); ''All passionate language
does of itself become musical'' (Carlyle); ''All the languages of art have been
developed as an attempt to transform the instantaneous into the permanent''
(John Berger); ''The landscape thinks itself in me . . . I am its consciousness''
(Paul Cezanne); Cezanne wanted ''to make visible how the world touches us''
(Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

Ms. Ackerman leaves no stone (or adjective) unturned in her search for
material. We find her in the Amazonian rain forest, or she might be gazing at
an Antarctic iceberg and musing on its colors for our edification. Her thoughts
travel centrifugally to her sensory adventures in Africa, Asia and Europe, and,
at one point, we find ourselves being piloted by her in an airplane. Most of
this is good stuff, but readers may wonder whether they have to go to all these
places to do justice to their senses. There's something very deluxe, more
sentient than thou, about the book.

The author is most interesting when she gives herself up to speculation, when
she suggests, for example, that our big brains left our noses very little room,
or when she does a long, imaginative riff on music and hearing. But I wish she
had speculated more. Anyone can report the facts, but she is a writer, a poet.
If, as she says, colors have no purpose, why then do they exist? If we don't
need a sense of smell to survive, why do we crave it so, as she puts it? The joy
of a book like ''A Natural History of the Senses'' lies to a great extent in the
author's improvisations on such themes. Ms. Ackerman could afford a little
more sociological spaciousness and a little less effusion.

She might have asked - instead of treating us to little hortatory slaps on the
wrist - why we seem to be suffering today from sensory anxiety. Why do we
stuff our senses, as if we were afraid of losing them? Is it the abstractness of
the contemporary world that frightens us? It seems there are cycles in the
history of the senses, times when we suppress them and times when we exalt
them. Right now - and even more so in the touch-and-feel fads of the 1960's -
we seem to have suppressed them by exalting them. We have blinded our
senses by turning a spotlight on them. But the senses are modest: they do their
best work unobtrusively.

Ms. Ackerman is not unobtrusive. When her energy overflows into adjectives,
she has a spilling, or a splashing, style. She writes of ''animals, which can
smell with beatific grandeur'' and of ''the way deer steal into the yard with
their big hearts and fragile dreams.'' Describing a pair of lovers in a restaurant,
she says, ''He stares into her eyes, as if filling them with molten lead.'' While
scuba diving off the Bahamas, she broods on certain parallels between female
anatomy and the ocean's tides until her eyes fill with tears underwater. A poet
ought to be more careful.

But she works hard for us - talking to a woman who creates some of the
leading perfumes, talking to marine biologists, talking even to icebergs in one
of her best passages. She includes a wonderful catalogue of the names of the
winds in different parts of the world. She goes to the research centers where
the senses are being investigated and brings back the latest news. But while
her book does everything we might have expected, there's not much in it that
one didn't expect.
Like most champions, Ms. Ackerman arouses a certain amount of
ambivalence in the skeptical sensibility. She may be a bit too proprietary, too
much of a hostess, in her attitude toward the senses. (She even takes us into
her bubble bath.) There's something unsublimated and Erica Jongish about
her, and we sometimes wonder whether this is a book about the five senses or
her autobiography - or could they be the same? She finds too many things
ravishing. Like the bat in her hair, the reader coughs gently.

Anatole Broyard is a former editor of The Book Review