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