Mary Oliver writes in Long Life p.23, "The mountain and the forest are sublime but the valley soil raises richer crops. The perfect gift is no longer a house but a house, or a mind divided. Man finds he has two halves of his existence: Leisure and occupation, and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results."
She knows that appreciation of nature is over run by the struggle for existence. A tree isn't beautiful, it's timber or firewood.
"...the experience led him, led his mind, from simple devotion of that beauty which is harmony, a kindly ministry of thought to nature's deeper and inexplicable greatness. The gleam and tranquility of the natural world he loved always, and now he honored also the world's brawn and mystery, it's machinations that lay beyond our understanding--that are not even namable. What Wordsworth praised thereafter was more than the arrangement of concretizations and vapors into appreciable and balanced landscapes; it was, also, the whirlwind."
No comments:
Post a Comment