
NOTHING SACRED
WHILE WESTERN CULTURE celebrates sight, sound, taste, and smell in the visual arts, music, gastronomy, fragrance, and more, touch is the sole sense that has been largely relegated to the realm of the physical. The digital revolution reinforced the long-standing valorization of the intellectual over the material; fingers (the original digits) connect our bodies to the virtual machine, where zeroes and ones (the abstract digits composing the binary system) are thought to do all the work. It has taken a pandemic to reveal the extent to which humans thrive on touch and how imperative our social and