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More Quotes compiled by John Ferree
“…when an
Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child,
she lets it handle the ‘things’ of that particular country:
leaves, fruit, insects and so forth.
The child, at its mother’s breast, will toy with the
‘thing’ , talk to it, test its teeth on it, learn its name – and
finally chuck it aside. We
give our children computer games…they give their children the land.”
Bruce Chatwin ‘The Songlines”
“The ancient
Egyptians believed the seat of the soul was in the tongue: the tongue was the rudder or steering-oar with which a man
steered his course through the world.”
Bruce Chatwin, “The Songlines”
“poetry is
the mother tongue of the human race as the garden is older than the
field, painting than writing, singing than disclaiming, parables than
inferences, bartering than commerce….”
-- J.G. Hamann
“Aesthetica in Nuce”
“Richard Lee
calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900
miles before he begins to walk on his own.
Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the
contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a
poet.”
-- Bruce
Chatwin – “The Songlines”
“as a general
rule of biology, migratory species are less ‘aggressive’ than
sedentary ones. There is
one obvious reason why this should be so.
The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey:
a ‘leveler’ on which the ‘fit’ survive and the stragglers
fall by the wayside. The
journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance.
The ‘dictators’ of the animal kingdom are those who live in
the ambience of plenty. The
anarchists, as always, are the ‘gentlemen of the road’.
--Bruce Chatwin
– “The Songlines”
“In
‘Aaranda Traditions’, Strehlow contrasts two Central Australian
peoples: one sedentary, one mobile.
The Aranda, living in a country of safe waterholes and plentiful
game, were arch-conservatives whose ceremonies were unchangeable,
initiations brutal, and whose penalty for sacrilege was death.
They looked on
themselves as a ‘pure’ race and rarely thought of leaving their
land. The Western Desert People, on the other hand, were as open
minded as the Aranda were closed. They
borrowed songs and dances freely, loving their land no less and yet
forever on the move. ‘The
most striking thing about these people’, Strehlow writes, ‘was their
ready laughter. They were a
cheerful laughing people, who bore themselves as though they had never
known a care in the world. Aranda
men, civilized on sheep stations, used to say, ‘’They are always
laughing. They can’t help
it’”
-- Bruce Chatwin – “The Songlines”
“What can we
do? We were born with the
Great Unrest. Our father
taught us that life is one long journey on which only the unfit are left
behind.”
--Caribou Eskimo to Dr. Knud Rassmussen
“When I rest
my feet my mind also ceases to function.”
J.G. Hamann
“Psychiatrists,
politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is
an aberrant form of behavior; a neurosis; a form of unfulfilled sexual
longing; a sickness which, in the interests of civilization, must be
suppressed.
Nazi
propaganda claimed that gypsies and Jews – peoples with wandering in
their genes – could find no place in a stable Reich.
Yet,
in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept:
that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once
existed between man and the universe.”
Bruce Chatwin – “The
Songlines”
“You cannot
travel the path before you have become the Path itself.”
Gautama Buddha
“The Wayless
Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find
themselves.”
Meister Eckhart
“It is
good to collect things, but it is better to go on walks.”
Anatole France
“Our
nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.”
Pasca, “Pensees”
“A
study of the Great Malady; horror of home.”
Baudelaire, “Journaux Intimes”
“The founders
of monastic rule were forever devising techniques for quelling
wanderlust in their novices. ‘A
monk out of his cell’, said St. Anthony. ‘is like a fish out of
water.’ Yet Christ and
the Apostles walked their journey through the hills of Palestine.”
Bruce Chatwin – “The Songlines”
“What is this
strange madness, Petrarch asked of his young secretary, this mania for
sleeping each night in a different bed?”
Bruce Chatwin – “The Songlines”
“What am I
doing here?”
Rimbaud writing home from Ethopia
“To
live in one land, is captivitie, To runne all countries, a wild
roguery.”
Donne’s third “Elegie”
“Internal
burning….wandering fever…” Kalevla
“…I
found a picture of a ‘fuzzy wuzzy’ carved in relief on an Egyptian
tomb of the Twelfth Dynasty at Beni Hassan:
a pitiful, emaciated figure, like the pictures of victims of the
Sahel drought, and recognizably the same as Mahmoud.
The Pharos had vanished: Mahmoud
and his people had lasted. I
felt I had to know the secret of their timeless and irreverent
vitality.”
Bruce Chatwin – “The Songlines”
"Why is
man the most restless, dissatisfied of animals?
Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas
sedentary ones always try to change it?
Why have the great teachers - Christ or the Buddha - recommended
the Road as the way to salvation? De
we agree with Pascal that all man's troubles stem from his inability to
sit quietly in a room?"
From the flyleaf of "The
Songlines" by Bruce Chatwin
"O Public
Road You express me better than I can express myself. You shall be more
to me than my poem."
Walt Whitman
"The
heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, the
moon increaseth, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air
is tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow, to their conservation
no doubt, to teach us that we should ever be in motion."
Robert Burton
"There is
no happiness for the man who does not travel.
Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a
sinner..Therefore, wander!"
Aitareya Brahmana
"The more
money you spend (while traveling) the higher the wall you are building
between yourself and the places you visit."
Rick Steves
“I discovered
a tongue of land which appeared like an island though it was not, but
might be cut through and made so in two days; it contained six houses. I
do not, however, see the necessity of fortifying the place, as the
people here are simple in war-like matters, as your Highnesses will see
by those seven which I have ordered to be taken and carried to Spain in
order to learn our language and return, unless your Highnesses should
choose to have them all transported to Castile, or held captive in the
island. I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men, and govern
them as I pleased.”
Christopher Columbus
“We anchored
and remained till Tuesday, when at daybreak I went ashore with the boats
armed. The people we found naked like those of San Salvador, and of the
same disposition. They suffered us to traverse the island, and gave us
what we asked of them.”
Christopher Columbus
“They are all
extremely verdant and fertile, with the air agreeable, and probably
contain many things of which I am ignorant, not inclining to stay here,
but visit other islands in search of gold. And considering the
indications of it among the natives who wear it upon their arms and
legs, and having ascertained that it is the true metal by showing them
some pieces of it which I have with me, I cannot fail, with the help of
our Lord, to find the place which produces it.”
Christopher Columbus 1st
Voyage
“Those who
went for water informed me that they had entered their houses and found
them very clean and neat, with beds and coverings of cotton nets. Their
houses are all built in the shape of tents, with very high chimneys.
None of the villages which I saw contained more than twelve or fifteen
of them. Here it was remarked that the married women wore cotton
breeches, but the younger females were without them, except a few who
were as old as eighteen years. Dogs were seen of a large and small size,
and one of the men had hanging at his nose a piece of gold half as big
as a castellailo, with letters upon it. I endeavored to purchase it of
them in order to ascertain what sort of money it was but they refused to
part with it.”
Christopher Columbus 1st Voyage
They have no
iron, their javelins being without it, and nothing more than sticks,
though some have fish-bones or other things at the ends. They are all of
a good size and stature, and handsomely formed. …It appears to me,
that the people are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of
opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear
to have no religion. They very quickly learn such words as are spoken to
them.”
Christopher Columbus 1st Voyage
"Why are these poor houseless savages hunted down like
wild beasts, butchered in their hammocks, driven by the unrighteous arm
of power from their home and their country?..Because the white man wants
their land."
---1838 Charles Manly in an address before the alumni and senior class
of the University Of North Carolina in Gerard Hall.
In1848 Manly was elected governor of North Carolina.
Writing of the
importance of the sense of smell: “We
ought to keep all senses vibrant and alive.
Had we done so, we should never have built
a civilization which outrages them, which so outrages them,
indeed, that a vicious circle has been established and the dull sense
grown duller.”
Henry Beston The Outermost House
“We are being
sold the idea that information is learning, and we’re being sold a
bill of goods. Information
isn’t learning. It
isn’t wisdom. It isn’t common sense, necessarily. It isn’t kindness. Or
good judgement . Or
imagination. Or a sense of
humor. Or courage.
Information doesn’t tell us right from wrong. …The greatest of all avenues to learning – to wisdom,
adventure, pleasure, insight, to understanding human nature, understand
ourselves and our world and our place in it – is in reading books.”
David McCoullough in
4/18/00 “Family Circle Magazine”
“I believe a
leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire
is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the
tree-toad is a chef-d’ouevre for the highest,
And the running
blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the
narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow
crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is
miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”
Walt Whitman
Having pried
through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counsel’d with doctors and
calculated close, I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.”
Walt Whitman
“I think I
could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and
look at them and long and long.
They do not
sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie
awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not
make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is
dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels
to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is
respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”
Walt Whitman
“I hear and
behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I
understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I
wish to see God better than this day?
I see something
of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of
men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters
from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave
them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’re I go,
Others will
punctually come for ever and ever.”
Walt Whitman
“The more
money you spend (while traveling) the higher the wall you are building
between yourself and the places you visit”.
Rick Steves
We cannot solve the significant problems we have
with the level of thinking with which we created them.
Albert Einstein
“For
mine eyes are upon all their ways; they are not hid from my face,
neither is their iniquity hid from mine eyes.
And first I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double;
because they have defiled my land, they have filled mine inheritance
with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable things”
--Jeremiah 16: 17 – 18
“And I
brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the
goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine
heritage an abomination.”
Jeremiah 2:7
Paraphrase:
“Adventure is putting one’s ignorance into motion”.
William Least Heat Moon – “River Horse”
“In the
spring mornings the rider on the plains will hear bird songs unknown in
the East. The Missouri
skylark (now known as Sprague’s pipit) sings while soaring above the
great plateaus so high in the air that it is impossible to see the bird;
and this habit of singing while soaring it shares with some sparrow-like
birds that are often found in company with it.
The white-shouldered lark bunting, in its livery of black, has
rich, full notes, and as it sings on the wing it reminds one of the
bobolink; and the sweet-voiced lark finch (lark sparrow) also utters its
song on the air.”
Theodore Roosevelt (We actually had a President who could and would
write such lines!)
“When a
stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that
it’s his duty.”
G.B. Shaw Caesar and Cleopatra 1898
"Many
people have surmised that our quickening sense of time depends upon the
diminishing percentage of a lifetime that each hour or year takes up as
we age. To a year-old baby,
a year is a lifetime - eternity. To
a ten-year-old, a year is but a tenth of his lifetime, and each hour is
proportionately shorter. "When
he reaches fifty,' writes (Guy) Murchie, 'time is passing five times
faster still, clocks have begun to whiz, and a year is but two percent
of his life. And, if he
reaches a hundred, it's one percent.
His old friends have been dying off at a fearful rate, while new
children sprout into adults like spring flowers.
Strange buildings pop up like mushrooms.
A whole year to him actually consumes less conscious time than
did four days when he was one year old.'"
K.C. Cole "First You Build A Cloud And Other Reflections On
Physics As A Way Of Life “Scientific theories tend to fit the
intellectual fashions of our times.”
Isaac Asimov
“I will age
ungracefully until I become an old woman in a small garden doing
whatever the hell I want”
Robin Chotzinoff
“Courage
is the price that Life extracts for granting peace
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things;
Knows not the
vivid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.
How can Life
grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s
dominion? Each time we make
a choice, we pay
With courage to behold the restless day,
And count it fair.
Amelia Earhart
“To be worth
making at all a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the
world of objects and dimensions. What
value can there be in seeing or experiencing anything for the first time
unless it comes as a revelation? And
for that to happen, some previously held thought or belief must be
confounded, or enhanced, or even transcended.
What difference can it make otherwise to see a redwood tree, a
tiger, or a humming bird?”
Ted Simon Jupiter’s Travels
“I had never before been specially
superstitious, but the experiences of the journey had changed the way I
viewed things…I saw that things could happen in other ways than
according to the physical laws I had been taught, and I found the world
a much richer and more satisfying place because of that.”
Ted Simon Jupiter’s
Travels
"Like all strong prejudices they not only
prepared me for the worst. They
paved the way."
Ted Simon Jupiter's Travels
"For me this is a landscape and a time to
bank up courage in a craven heart, to carry a greater fund of joy into
the next cloud of sorrow, to learn even to love the sorrow for the
pleasure it divides, like the black notes of a keyboard, or hunger
between means. Perhaps even
to discover that pain and pleasure, since they cannot exist without each
other, are really the same thing."
Ted Simon Jupiter's Travels
"I am learning, as I make my way through my
first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more
frightening to contemplate them."
Ted
Simon Jupiter's
Travels
“The sky is still only
faintly streaked with clouds when I pass the Modder River, but on the
horizon to my right are the beginnings of a sinister change.
Hundreds of miles away across the moorland the sky is changing
colour from light blue to gun metal, as though a vessel of dark pigment
has ben pricked by the western point of the compass and is seeping out
into the heavens. Surely it
is not merely fanciful to read apocalyptic warnings into the sky like
this. Out on the veld,
miles from even the nearest tree, there is no escape from the momentous
events unfolding themselves above.
Unknown to this human speck making his snail’s track across the
floor of a vast arena, another spectacular has been prepared.
Pressures and temperatures have plummeted, winds veered and
strengthened, and when the first stain darkens the western sky the thing
is already all but accomplished.
The climax is so quick
and subtle and on such a vast scale that my eye cannot follow it.
The sky is light, then dark, then cloudy, then black.
I am hoping for another half hour’s grace when the first drops
splat on my goggles. Cursing,
I pull up at the verge and begin the ludicrous business of putting on my
waterproofs. Then I am in it.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s
Travels
“There are in me the seeds from which, if
necessary, the universe could be reconstructed.
In me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and a holograph for
the whole world. Nothing is
more important in my life than trying to discover these secrets.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s Travels
“In
England, Japan, and other countries, you must take comprehensive
training, pass rigerous tests, and ride a smaller-capacity,
low-horsepower motorcycle until you are old enough and experienced
enough to handle more. Here,
any seventeen year-old, the hallmark of which age is general lack of
judgment, can be licensed to ride a machine with similarities to a
rocket after passing a test that is largely dependant on knowing where
the turn signals are.”
Milissa Holebrook Pierson – The
Perfect Vehicle
“I
tucked my gloves into my helmet and stood by the bike looking up and
down the country road and across the field of green wheat wondering who
was going to help me this time, and what it would lead to.
I did not doubt that help would come and with it most probably
some unexpected twist in my fortune.
It had taken years to achieve that measure of confidence and
calm, and as I waited I allowed myself some pleasure in knowing it.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s
Travels
“I
looked at the absurdly overloaded Triumph standing next to me in the
gutter and had my first cruel glimpse of the reality of what I was
embarking on. My vision had
been dazzled by the purple drama of warfare and banditry.
Now I saw, with awful clarity, that a large part of my life
henceforth would be devoted to the daily grind of packing and unpacking
this poor, dumb beast.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s
Travels
“It
was going to be the journey of a lifetime, a journey that millions dream
of and never make, and I wanted to do justice to all those dreams”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s Travels
“It
is no trick to go around the world these days, you can pay a lot of
money and fly around it nonstop in less than 48 hours, but to know it,
to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl.
There is no other way. Not
flying, not floating. You
have to stay on the ground and swallow the bugs as you go.
Then the world is immense.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s Travels
“Does
it rain because you carry your umbrella, or because you don’t?
It’s a personal matter depending on how you remember it.
The way I write my own history, its low on winning streaks.
I never could gamble. I
like to work things out in advance, but it bothers me to think of what I
might have been missing. I’ve
done too much hacking away against the grain of life.
Without all that solemn effort, maybe, I could have gone further,
faster, easier.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s Travels
“Thinking’s
like a black tunnel. Once
you’re in it you have to think your way through to the other end. At least I think so.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s Travels
“Just
look at me. Look where I
am. Isn’t this too bloody
fantastic for words? It’s
me here, not Lawrence of Arabia or Rudolph Valentino or Rommel and the
Afrika Korps. Me and this
little machine, we have made it here.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s
Travels
“If
the Japanese ever got a foothold, British bikes would quickly become
only a nostalgic memory.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s
Travels (1973)
“That
night I lie out under the stars again.
The Pleiades are there winking at me.
I am no longer on my way from one place rto another.
I have changed lives. My
life now is as black and white as night and day; a life of fierce
struggle under the sun, and peaceful reflection under the night sky.
I feel as though I am floating on a raft far, far away from any
world I ever knew.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s
Travels
(On
the occasion of a flat tire in Africa)
“Petulant. Frustrated.
I raised my voice. Why not. Empty
highway. No one around.
‘Isn’t this just bloody perfect?’ I shouted.
‘Yes’, said God, ‘but I didn’t hear Him’”. Ted
Simon – Jupiter’s Travels
“At
the time it seemed to me that what I wanted was to have my problem
solved quickly and to get on my way.
I had a boat to catch in Cape Town and the journey was still the
main thing. What happened
on the way, who I met, all that was incidental.
I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the
journey.” Ted Simon – Jupiter’s
Travels
“I
was becoming a carrier of the dreams of men.
I gathered them like pollen, fertilizing as I went.
But I had not yet quite realized my power, nor its transforming
effect on people and I still thought they were as I saw
them." Ted Simon – Jupiter’s
Travels
“My encounters with the weather continue to be like
reconstructions of a personal struggle on an epic scale.
On the broad landscape of Africa, under the bright tropical sun,
a bank of cumulus clouds appears out of thin air and grows with stealthy
speed into the solid likeness of doom itself.
In an otherwise clear sky one of these monsters straddles the
road ahead, growing minute by minute, like an airborne octopus of mythic
proportions, its base filling with inky blackness, already feeling out
the ground with stray tentacles. To leave the sunshine and ride underneath this devouring
creature with its foetid breath and bulging carcass is like challenging
the Dark Tower; as impudent and terrifying as that.
To know with the intellect of what flimsy stuff this thing is
really made does not disarm it when you have already fought to
exhaustion with even flimsier devils of your own making.
Perhaps there are men raised in peace and lucidity, with no
phantoms on their tails, who see nothing in a storm cloud but convection
currents and water vapor. In
any case, I would not change places with one of them.
What grandeur there is in my life blossoms out of my own mean
beginnings. What times of peace I know are a thousand times more precious
for being interludes. And
there is much more. For
example, the fascination with which I watch myself come closer and
closer to merge with the world around me, dipping first a toe, then a
foot, then a limb. Although
I am made of the same stuff as the world, it used to seem that I might
as well have been born on an asteroid, so awkward and unnatural was my
place in the scheme of things. I
remember my clumsy efforts to simulate ‘normality’, to win
acceptance by any false pretence, and my desperate betrayals of my own
nature to avoid detection. Then
the gradual discovery (born, I think, out of some irreducible core) that
others were twisting and cracking under the same strain, and that behind
the apparent conformity of daily life was a world of ‘all things
counter, original, spare, strange’.
Then began a long apprenticeship, to become something certain in
my own right, from which to see and be seen.
Beyond that came the search for connections, freely offered and
accepted, to confirm that the world and I, after all, were made of each
other.
There are in me the seeds from which, if necessary, the universe
could be reconstructed. In
me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and a holograph for the whole
world. Nothing is more
important in my life than trying to discover these secrets.”
Ted Simon – Jupiter’s
Travels
"The sight of any free animal going about
its business undisturbed, seeking its food, or looking after its young,
or mixing in the company of its kind, all the time being exactly what it
ought to be, and can be - what a strange pleasure it gives us". Schopenhauer
"If
I did not band the crows or frighten them by climbing to their nest, it
was not because I loved the science less, but because I loved trying to
understand undisturbed nature the more.
Only when wild animals go about their business paying little
attention to me do I feel I get an idea of what wonderful creatures they
are"
Lawrence Kilham "On Watching Birds"
2.
Ecclesiastes 5:11
"When
goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and what
good
is there to the owners therof, saving the beholding of them with their
eyes?"
In
describing the dress of the Chinookan ladies who lived along the
Columbia River and sometimes visited the expedition camps in order
"to gratify the passions of our men": (spelling &
punctuation as written)
"...their
robes are Smaller only covering their Shoulders & falling down to
near the hip.and sometims when it is cold a piec of fur curiously plated
and connected so as to meet around the body from the arms to the hips. The
garment which occupies the Waist and thence as low as the knee before
and midleg behind, cannot properly be called a petticoat, in the common
accep(ta)tion of the word; it is a tissue formed of white cedar bark
bruised or broken into Small Strans, which are interwoven in their
center by means of Several cords of the same Materials which Serves as
well for a girdle as to hold in place the Strans of bark which forms the
tissue, and which Strans, confined in the middle, hang withe their ends
pendulous from the waist, the whole being of Suff(i)cent thickness when
the female Stands erect to conceal those parts useally covered from
familiar view, but when she stoops or places herself in any other
attitude this battery of Venus is not altogether impervious to the
penetrating eye of the amorite."
William
Clark wrote: "These people view sensuality as a necessary evill,
& do not appear to abhore this as a crime in the unmarried
females."
"As
I stand aloof and look there is to me something profoundly affecting in
large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in
men." Walt
Whitman
"The
length of the discourse indicates the distance between the speaker and
the hearer. If they were at
perfect understanding - no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be *suffered"
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Dwelling
thus upon the dunes, I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural
life which manifest itself every hour of the day, and from being thus
surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of energy, there were
times, on the threshold of Spring, when the force seemed as real as heat
from the sun. A skeptic may
smile and ask me to come to his laboratory and demonstrate; he may talk
as he will of the secret workings of my own isolated and uninfluenced
flesh and blood, but I think that those who have lived in nature, and
tried to open their doors rather than close them to
her energies, will understand well enough what I mean.
Life is as much a force in the universe as electricity or
gravitational pull, and presence of life sustains life"
Henry
Beston "The Outermost House"
1933
"You
road that I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that
is here.
I
believe that much unseen is also here".
Walt Whitman
"Fear
is deception. It attests
that you have seen yourself as you could never be. and therefore look
upon a world which is impossible. Not
one thing in the world is true. It
does not matter what the form in which it may appear.
It wittenesses but to your own illusions of yourself.
Let us not be decieved today.
We are the Sons of God. There
is no fear in us, for we are each a part of Love itself"
Lesson
240 "A Course In Miracles"
"The
world, tired of ideology, is opening itself to the truth."
His Holiness, Pope John Paul II
From: ‘Crossing
The Threshold Of Hope
"The
arctic has many individuials and few species.
The tropical forests have many species and few individuals"
Lawrence Kilham
"If
natural selection seems cruel at times, it is beneficient in the long
run, freeing species from the harassing effects of useless competition.
It also shapes each in a special niche in which it can live.
Are these ideas mine or have I heard them elsewhere?
Erasmus Darwin, a country doctor in 18th century England, was the
one who thought up the idea of evolution by natural selection well ahead
of his grandson, Charles. It
was Erasmus' idea that all creatures delight in life. 'The happier they
are', he wrote, 'the more likely it is that they are well adapted to
their environment, and hence will survive'".
Lawrence Kilham from
"Never Enough Of Nature
"The
hot-springs of love run deep and pervasive in the clay of all
vertebrates. It is not
surprising that their external bubblings appear much the same in a
university graduate, an Australian
bushman, or a lowly sparrow".
J.C.
Welty
“The world today is sick to its thin blood for
lack of elemental things, for fire before hands, for water welling up
from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot….”
Henry
Beston from "The Outermost House" 1933
La Nature, voila mon pays.
L’oeurve – celebrer, reveler la mystere, la
beaute,
et la mistique de la Nature, du Monde Visible.
Attacher ce sentiment a mon nom.
(Nature – this is my country.
The work – to celebrate, to reveal the mystery,
the beauty, and the rites of Nature, of the
Visible World.
To bind this feeling to my name.)
Henry Beston
“Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as
science”
Henry Beston from "The Outermost House" 1933
“Into the vast bright days I go…”
Henry Beston from "The Outermost House" 1933
“The adventure of the sun is the great natural
drama by which we live”
Henry Beston from "The Outermost House" 1933
“In that hollow of space and brightness, in
that ceaseless travail of wind and sand and ocean, the world one sees is
still the world unharassed of man, a place of instancy and eternity of
creation and the noble ritual of the burning year.”
Henry Beston from the introduction to "The Outermost
House" 1933
“Nature is part of our humanity, and without
some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be
man. When the Pleiades and
the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part
of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic
outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor
the birthright of a true humanity.
As I once said, elsewhere, ‘Man can either be less than man or
more than man, and both are monsters, the last more dread”.
Henry Beston from his introduction to "The
Outermost House" 1933
“The great rhythms of nature, today so dully
disrespected, wounded even, here have their spacious and primeval
liberty; cloud and shadow of cloud, wind and tide, tremor of night and
day. Journeying birds alight here and fly away again all unseen,
schools of great fish move beneath the waves, the surf flings its spray
against the sun.”
Henry Beston from "The Outermost House" 1933
Of his fireplace, “…my fire was more than a
source of heat – it was an elemental presence, a household god, and a
friend.”
Henry Beston from his introduction to "The Outermost
House" 1933
"There is no harshness here in the landscape
line, no hard Northern brightness or brusque revelation; there is always
reserve and mystery, always something beyond, on earth and sea something
which nature, honoring, conceals".
Henry Beston from "The Outermost House" 1933
“It is dark to-night, and over the plains of
ocean the autumnal sky rolls up the winter stars.”
Henry Beston from "The Outermost House" 1933
On flocks of birds flying up before him as he
walks the beach: “Standing
on the beach….I watch the lovely sight of the group instantly turned
into a constellation of birds, into a fugitive pleiades whose living
stars keep their chance positions….”
Henry Beston from "The Outermost House" 1933
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more
mystical concept of animals. Remote
from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in
civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and
sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic
fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.
And therein we err, and greatly err.
For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move
finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost
or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are
other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow
prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
Henry Beston from "The Outermost House" 1933
On listening to flocks of geese flying overhead
in the night:
"I climbed the big dune then, the peak of
these sand mountains; the moon shadow was dark upon its eastern slope,
but the crest was lifted to the light and commanded both marsh and sea. The channels were still as moonlit forest lakes, the sea was
a great deep surfaced with a thin moon splendor of golden green.
I lingered there till the moon began to pale, listening to the
wild music of the great birds, for a river of life was flowing that
night across the sky."
Henry
Beston "The Outermost
House"
"Our fantastic civilization has fallen out
of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than
with night".
Beston
"With lights and ever more lights, we drive
the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the
villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it." Beston
"...today's civilization is full of people
who have never even seen night. Yet
to live thus, to know only artificial night. is as absurd and evil as to
know only artificial day."
Beston
"Learn to reverence night and to put away
the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the
experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic
mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.
By day, space is one with the earth and with man - it is his sun
that is shining, his clouds that are floating past; at night, space is
his no more. When the great
earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the
universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so
clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them
as they gaze. For a moment
of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its
stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons
across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during
it, ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, and poetry makes
its own both the human spirit and experience." Beston
“The longer I live here and the more I see of
birds and animals, the greater my admiration becomes for those artists
who worked in Egypt so many long thousand years ago, drawing, painting,
carving in the stifling quiet of the royal tombs, putting here ducks
frightened out of the Nile marshes, here cattle being herded down a
village street, here the great sun vulture, the jackal, and the snake.
To my mind no representation of animals equal these Egyptian
renderings. I do not write
in praise of faithful delineation or pictorial usage – though the
Egyptian drew from his model with care – but of the unique power to
reach, understand, and portray the very psyche of animals.
The power is particularly notable in Egyptian representation of
birds. A hawk of stone
carved in hardest granite on a temple wall will have the soul of all
hawks in its eyes. Moreover,
there is nothing human about these Egyptian creatures.
They are self-contained and aloof as becomes folk of a first and
intenser world”.
Henry Beston “The
Outermost House”
“To my mind, we live too completely by the eye.
I like a good smell...”
Henry Beston “The
Outermost House”
"And what of Nature itself, you say - that
callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much
an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know
that some passer-by has been getting life from books. It is true
that there are grim arrangements. Beware of judging them by whatever
human values are in style". "The economy of nature, its checks
and balances, its measurements of competing life - all this is its great
marvel and has an ethic of its own. Live in Nature, and you will soon
see that for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain".
Henry Beston - "The Outermost House"
"Whatever attitude to human existence you
fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of
an attitude to Nature". Henry Beston - "The Outermost
House"
Of human life, Beston wrote:
"The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and
poetry which sustain it are of Nature's inspiriation; they are born of
the mystery and beauty of the world."
"Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the
earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your
spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth's and
they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak,
Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over the ocean from the
beach".
Beston: The Outermost House
“It is only when we are aware of the earth and
of the earth as poetry that we truly live.
Ages and people which sever the earth from the poetic spirit, or
do not care, or stop their ears with knowledge as with dust, find their
veins grown hollow and their hearts an emptiness echoing to questioning.
For the earth is ever more than the earth, more than the upper
and the lower field, the tree and the hill.
Here is mystery banded about the forehead with green, here are
gods ascending, here is benignancy and the corn in the sun,
here terror and night, here life, hear death, here fire, here the
wave coursing in the sea. It
is this earth which is the true inheritance of man, his link with the
human past, the source of his religion, ritual, and song, the kingdom
without whose splendor he lapses from his mysterious estate of man to a
baser world which is without the other virtue and the other integrity of
the animal. True humanity
is no inherent right but an achievement; and only through the earth may
we be as one with all who have been and all who are yet to be, sharers
and partakers of the mystery of living, reaching to the full of human
peace and the full of human joy.”
Henry Beston: Herbs and the
Earth 1935
“Here in this pleasant arbor by the herbs, with
the grape overhead, and the Basil in flower in the open sun, here in
this quiet varied with an early summer sound of country birds, one may
well muse awhile on how the soul may possess and keep her earth
inheritance. The age in which we live is curious and bewildered; it is
without a truly human past and may be without a human future, and so
abruptly it came that one might imagine some cosmic spirit or wayward
daimon to have reached down and plucked man by the hair.
It has lost the earth, but found (since the comfortable century
of philosophers in dressing gowns) a something which is called
“nature,” and of which it speaks with enthusiasm and embalms in
photographs. It has lost as
well the historic sense, the poignant and poetic recognition of the long
continuity of man, that sense within our hearts which is moved by a
chance print in an old book of a countryman ploughing with oxen beside
ruins overgrown with Fennel while to one side women clap cymbals
together to calm the swarming bees.”
Henry Beston: Herbs and the
Earth 1935
“A garden is a mirror of a mind. It is a place of life, a mystery of green moving to the pulse
of the year, and pressing on and pausing the while to its own inherent
rhythms. In making a garden
there is something to be sought and something to be found. To be sought is a sense of the lovely and assured, of garden
permanence and order, of human association and human meaning; to be
found is beauty and that unfolding content and occupation which is one
of the lamps of peace.”
Henry Beston: Herbs and the
Earth 1935
“The gardening ancients were more wise.
Flowers were for them but an aspect, an incidental loveliness of
something near to man, living, and green.
Plants were identities, presences to be lived with, known, and
watched growing; they were shapes and habits of leaves, powers,
fragrances, and life-familiars. A
sense of form gave the garden its tranquillity, and one might hear
there, in | 