"While searching for the right angle to take a selfie, a miracle happened: I got hungry. Partly because of the heat, partly because I'd had just one black coffee in the morning, the head of Rodin's Thinker started tilting and melting, and the massive weight of his body became visible to my mind. It was as if the statue was slowly liquefying and transforming into a vegetal living thing,"
"And then some questions popped into my head: did the Thinker like cucumber salad? Where did he grow up? Did he prefer summer or winter? White wine or red? Where was he from? And in that moment I realised I had got it all wrong. I was so obsessed with his thinking brain that I had ignored his toes - not to mention the rest of him."
A revisitation of Rodin's The Thinker triggers an embodied epiphany when hunger and heat make the statue appear to liquefy and turn vegetal. The imagined transformation shifts attention from the isolated, fashionable idea of the brain to the rest of the body, toes included. A sudden curiosity about mundane preferences and origins dissolves the exclusive focus on abstract thinking. The moment reveals that cognition and personhood are not confined to a spongy organ inside the skull but are entangled with bodily presence, sensations, and the surrounding environment.
Read at Aeon
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