In the wildly eccentric and richly provocative Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide (2016), British naturalist, veterinarian, and barrister Charles Foster attempts to understand what it might be like to be an animal by living as one. He spends weeks on hands and knees snuffling about in the grass for worms and sleeping under the earth like a badger, slides around in a river on his stomach trying to catch fish with his mouth, otter-like, and rummages through trash bins in back alleys in London like an urban fox. The undertaking is at once ludicrous and illuminating as he becomes sensitized to textures, smells, vantage points, air currents and vibrations in the earth previously foreign to him.

In Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness (2021), Foster turns his attention to the question of what it is to be a human being - of what we are, seen in and through how we got here. He’s interested in three recent stages of human development: the Upper Paleolithic (wandering hunter-gatherers), the Neolithic (settlement farmers), and the Enlightenment (us). It is an oversimplification but also not wrong to say that he regards this sequence as a radical narrowing of human being, and he attempts to map out this decline and its losses experientially. The book is, as he puts it, “the story of how I tried to turn myself  into a hunter-gatherer, a farmer, and an Enlightenment reductionist - all in a desperate search to know what I am, how I should live and what shape consciousness adopts when it is folded into a human body.”

To explore the Upper Paleolithic, he repairs to the forest with his son, who, having dyslexia, is “a linguistic cripple, and so a sensory and ontological athlete,” and is, if anything, more enthusiastic about disemboweling foxes and making stone tools than his father. But as Foster reminds him the project is not about emulating the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers, but feeling and dreaming one’s way into the meaning of their relationship to themselves and to the natural world. In large part this means accepting the violence, suffering, and beauty of a fundamentally shamanic relation to nature - “after days of fasting in a peat hole on a moor near here, I sprouted black wings, flew over myself and the moor as I had hovered more suburbanly over myself in the hospital … croaked, ate a frog and stuck my beak into the chest of a long-dead sheep.” It becomes self-evident to him that “the world as a whole, and every little thing in it, from pebbles to whales, has some sort of consciousness.” After months of living in the woods, “the fasting, the shimmering, the edges of sleep, the edges of leaves, the edges of species, the edges of chewed bones and the edges of all categories are creating a new kind of consciousness in me.”

Foster doesn’t stint in his description of the inherited joys of the Neolithic, whether in scything his land or at a friend’s Hebridean harvest festival, “a sheep turning over the fire, salad from the hedgerow, dancing to the fiddle, the accordion and the bodhran, … vats of rhubarb wine, obscene and sublime songs, swimming in the sea to cool down for the next reel, … and a rumour of dolphins.” But he is vehement about the cost involved to the human relationship to the cosmos when survival requires staking out land, planting crops, domesticating animals, devising rules. His characterization of the Enlightenment, conveyed primarily through dinner conversations with Oxford academics, is more biting yet - though he maintains that the true Enlightenment spirit “changes everything - ontological, ethical, and epistemological - to a position close to that of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.” Real empiricism exposes “the vertiginous wonder of the world – a wonder that demands all our resources, in all our intellectual and sensory and, yes, spiritual modalities, for its exploration.” Or, as he puts it in regard to the practices of his Sicilian mother, in the end, “Apollo and Dionysus are the same god.”

Nature writing, travelogue, memoir, family history, anthropology and cultural critique rolled into one - less scholarly work on human evolution than almost recklessly untrammeled evocation of human experience and consciousness - Being a Human offers up a mind-expanding meditation on the nature of the human, and its possibilities.

Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover.  He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming.  When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.