Quote of the Day (T. M. Luhrmann, on the Sensory Experience of Listening to a Book)

“What happens when you hear a text rather than read it? The obvious thing is that you can do something else with your eyes. That is why I can listen to books when I garden. My hands and eyes can work. And so listening to a book is a different sensory experience than reading it. The inner imagining of the story becomes commingled with the outer senses — my hands on the trowel, the scent of tansy in the breeze. The creation of this sensory richness was in fact an explicit goal of the oral reading of the Bible in the medieval European cloister, so that daily tasks would be infused with Scripture, and Scripture would be remembered through ordinary tasks.”— American psychological anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, “Audiobooks and the Return of Storytelling,” The New York Times, February 23, 2014