A Peculiar Sense of Freedom

A Darwinian account of our origins brings with it little reassurance, but that isn't a reason to doubt its truth. It doesn't give us grounds for confidence in our powers of reasoning, but neither does it undermine that confidence. Darwinism offers a view according to which the evolution of awareness and reason is, in a broad sense, accidental. Some will respond by hoping for more, for a universe in which we are supposed to be here. Others might find that our deep contingency brings with it a peculiar sense of freedom.

Peter Godfrey-Smith, London Review of Books, 24 January 2013

Trees in Winter

Saturday 12th December 1874

There is a beauty in the trees peculiar to winter, when their fair delicate slender tracery unveiled by leaves and showing clearly against the sky rises bending with a lofty arch or sweeps gracefully drooping. The crossing and interlacing of the limbs, the smallest boughs and tender twigs make an exquisitely fine network which has something of the severe beauty of sculpture, while the tree in summer in its full pride and splendour and colour of foliage represents the loveliness of painting. The deciduous trees which seem to me most graceful and elegant in winter are the birches, limes, beeches. Opposite our South terrace windows towers a glorious ash, ivy-muffled to its throat, while its boughs sweeping gracefully fall in drooping showers all about it like a woman's hair softly flowing, or the arched cascade of water falling from the jet of a fountain.

Rev. Francis Kilvert

Reverie of a Solitary Walker

As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the edge of the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge me into a delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unawares. The ebb and flow of the water, its continuous yet undulating noise, kept lapping against my ears and my eyes, taking the place of all the inward movements which my reverie had calmed within me, and it was enough to make me pleasurably aware of my existence, without troubling myself with thought. From time to time some brief and insubstantial reflection arose concerning the instability of the things of this world, whose image I saw in the surface of the water, but soon these fragile impressions gave way before the unchanging and ceaseless movement which lulled me and without any active effort on my part occupied me so completely that even when time and the habitual signal called me home I could hardly bring myself to go.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fifth Walk, Reveries of  Solitary Walker

Image: Parc de Saint-Cloud, bassin de la Petite Gerbe, 1904, Eugene Atget

An Overwhelming Brightness

I often stood, it now comes back to me, watching the light fade, experiencing the long drawn out withdrawal of the wood into darkness. But while then, the trees, their twisted limbs and fissured boles, became lost in shadow and night, now, my memory, as if in emulation of a photographic negative, reverses this process, and instead of being absorbed in darkness, in my mind's eye the silhouettes of the trees are gradually obscured by an overwhelming brightness.

Andrei Selyenin: Flashing Water, Silent Earth.

Cures for Melancholy, Part One

Happy he, in that he is freed from the tumults of the world, he seeks no honours, gapes after no preferment, flatters not, envies not, temporizeth not, but lives privately, and well contented with his estate;

      Nec spes corde avidas, nec curam pascit inanem,
      Securus quo fata cadant.

      [He is not troubled with ambition nor vexed with care;
       indifferent to the fate of kingdoms.]

He is not troubled with state matters, whether kingdoms thrive better by succession or election; whether monarchies should be mixed, temperate, or absolute; the house of Ottomon's and Austria is all one to him; he inquires not after colonies or new discoveries; whether Peter were at Rome, or Constantine's donation be of force; what comets or new stars signify, whether the earth stand or move, there be a new world in the moon, or infinite worlds, etc. He is not touched with fear of invasions, factions, or emulations.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Burning like Maples

If men could only disintegrate like autumn leaves, fret away, dropping their substance like chlorophyll, would not our attitude toward death be different? Suppose we saw ourselves burning like maples in a golden autumn.

Loren Eiseley

Disorders of the Intellect

Disorders of the intellect happen much more often than superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannise, and force him to hope or fear beyond limits of sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity; but while this power is such as we can control and repress, it is not visible to others, nor considered as any depravation of the mental faculties: it is not pronounced madness but when it comes ungovernable, and apparently influences speech or action.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Images: Vampyr dir. Carl Theodore Dreyer