Abstract: The paper deals with the following questions: —How the "full-bodied" quality of lived meaning diminishes for the anthropoi with the growth of institutions and infrastructures beyond its somatic grasp —How, accordingly, lived experience is impoverished and flattened —How with growth, what is commonly imagination, rather than being the celebrated paragon of human nature, constitutes a response of the natural body's stretch beyond healthy limits, resulting in relative "desomaticization" —How the imagination ascends to dominance when real life—the materially embedded life of sensuous presence—dwindles —How what follows with the dwindling of our animal sensorium is a loss of tangible contact with the environing determinants of life —How the living body comes to be determined by objective factors beyond its reach except through abstraction (the symbolic), now dominant in social life, life at a decisive remove and disjointed from the rest of the natural world, alienated in the true sense The paper concludes with a call for a return to the body-scale as indispensable horizon of dismantling empire and restoration of place.