During a recent thunderstorm I had a momentary sense of how fine it would be to watch the storm from a remote moorland cottage. It was an imaginary sense of being closer to a natural world which has not been sanitised by modernity. A sense of being apart from the pressures and intrusions of modernity.
Following a similar theme, the passage below is taken from one of a series of detective novels by Josephine Tey. Her Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Alan Grant, has a period of debilitating mental fatigue due to overwork so takes himself off for a holiday in the Outer Hebrides. Here he begins to recover his equilibrium on a wild and lonely beach where he escapes the pressures and intrusions of London life.
He walked down over the fine white sand to the edge of the water, and let the tumult roar over him. At close quarters it had a senseless quality that dissolved his uncomfortable sense of diminution and made him feel human and superior. He turned his back on it almost contemptuously as one would on a bad-mannered child who was making an exhibition of himself. He felt warm and alive and master of himself; admirably intelligent and gratifyingly sentient. He walked back up the sand, absurdly, and extravagantly glad to be a human being and alive. The air that came off the land when he had turned his back on the salt sterile wind from the sea was gentle and warm. It was like opening the door of a house. He went on across the grassy levels without once looking back. The wind hounded him along the flat bogs, but it was no longer in his face and the salt was no longer in his nostrils. His nostrils were full of the good smell of damp earth; the smell of growing things. He was happy.
Josephine Tey – The Singing Sands (1952)
George Santayana had something to say along similar lines - our spiritual need to be among natural causes and to experience them as natural. It’s where so many modern environmental causes fall flat as they seek to wrap the natural world in fluffy political virtues.
A stupid convention still looks on material and mathematical processes as somehow distressing and ugly, and systems of philosophy, artificially mechanical, are invented to try to explain natural mechanism away; whereas in no region can the spirit feel so much at home as among natural causes, or realise so well its universal affinities, or so safely enlarge its happiness. Mechanism is the source of beauty. It is not necessary to look so high as the stars to perceive this truth: the action of an animal’s limbs or the movement of a waterfall will prove it to any one who has eyes and can shake himself loose from verbal prejudices, those debris of old perceptions which choke all fresh perception in the soul. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational decencies, make man’s chief desolation. A slight knocking of fools’ heads together might be enough to break up the ossifications there and start the blood coursing again through possible channels. Art has an infinite range; nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet nothing so persistently avoids the directions in which it might find most satisfaction.
George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905)
6 comments:
"Mechanism is the source of beauty". I'm not sure whether I agree with it, but that made me sit quietly and see things differently for a bit.
The only Santayana I've ever read is here. He always seems to have so many interesting and difficult ideas that actually buying a book of his and reading it would be daunting.
A few winters ago I saw a sunny stand of silver birches that had been cleaned to show off their bark to best effect. Lovely, they were.
It inspired me to write some haikus. Unfortunately I posted them in the comments thread of a long-forgotten blog.
No doubt some day someone will write a PhD thesis on them. Was my writing as spare, as elegant, as its inspiration? That sort of thing.
Tricky stuff 'spirit'.
There are some words that carry an enormous baggage of meanings, some contextual, some personal. Another word carrying baggage is 'love'. And then these baggage words change their meanings over time - and people fall out over which meaning is correct.
And some words pass out of use:
“Gloss”
I know a little man both ept and ert.
An intro-? extro-? No, he’s just a vert.
Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane,
His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.
When life turns sipid and the mind is traught,
The spirit soars as I would sist it ought.
Chalantly then, like any gainly goof,
My digent self is sertive, choate, loof.
~ David McCord
Sam - Santayana does tend to use rather odd language to get his point across. I think 'mechanism' is to be taken very widely, for example it could be the interactions of natural processes such as the lie of the land, streams, rivulets and rain in the hills which all end up to make an attractive waterfall.
dearieme - silver birches are one of my favourite trees. As well as its often elegant appearance I like its adaptability and its human-scale lifespan. It's a pity you didn't keep those haikus in a document somewhere.
DJ - 'spirit' seems to be one of those nebulous words it isn't easy to replace. In some contexts it's like a very broad sense of moral and cultural direction. We can say 'the spirit of scientific veracity has been corrupted' as a usefully concise criticism of our times, but there is an old-fashioned tinge to it.
Powerful words passing out of use does seem to be one of our major problem, possibly our biggest problem.
Careful, AKH, it will have you reinvestigating the princes in the tower.
James - she's already tempted me but I haven't followed it up yet. I'll just blame Henry VII for now.
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