ceiling, penknife jabbed into his leg, Su Qin had learned in those long, effortful years of study? What secret had he penetrated? What sort of education had he finally received at the end of his humiliations and breakthroughs? He had mastered the energy of his age - and the exact right sensibility to use it. Might we, Nan seemed to be asking, do the same? Vi Faced with the mad unsettling of his world during the Industrial Revolution of the mid 19 century, the German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche once mused that survival and greatness would depend on having what he called a “Sixth Sense”, by which he meant a feeling for history. Surely, he felt, an instinct for ancient balances and truths would provide a guide rail of sorts as the world lurched into a new age, along an uncharted road.? If you could say “This has happened before” or “This is how we got to where we are,” Nietzsche believed, it was the first step towards knowing where to go next. Nan and Kissinger knew the need for something else for our age as well, for a different instinct. It wasn’t just about knowing your history or feeling the real possibility of human progress or tragedy. Rather it was about feeling out the roots of the present in a certain way. All of our ideas - from how we love to what we think of politics - are taken from the feedback and experience of our lives, from what we've seen and done and felt and learned. We are the sum total of our experiences, in this sense. But what to do if changes happen at some deeper, insensible level where the old ideas and instincts, where the tools of sight and smell, of feel and taste and hearing don’t fully answer? What to do when we are confronted with what we've never experienced before? Never even dreamed of, perhaps? This book is the story of a completely fresh way of feeling our world. By this I mean a sensation that is as newborn as the lively sense of connection, of freedom, of electric uncertainty and hope that come with the knowledge that we a