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Some passages I particularly like.
There in the mountains, close to the delights of Nature, everything you see and hear is a joy. It is a joy unspoiled by and real discomfort. Your legs may possibly ache, or you may feel the lack of something really good to eat, but that is all.
I wonder why this should be? I suppose the reason is that, looking at the landscape, it is as though you were looking at a picture unrolled before you, or reading a poem on a scroll. The whole area is yours, but since it is just like a painting or a poem, it never occurs to you to try and develop it, or make your fortune by running a railway line there from the city. You are free from any care or worry because you accept the fact that this scenery will help neither to fill your belly, nor add a penny to your salary and are content to enjoy it just as scenery. This is the great charm of Nature, that it can in an instant, discipline men's heats and minds, and removing all that is base, lead them into the pure unsullied world of poetry.
Of course, I am only human. Therefore, however dear to me this sublime detachment from the world may be, there is a limit to how much of it I can stand at any one time. I do not suppose that even Tao Yuan-ming gazed continuously at the Southern hills year in and year out. Nor can I imagine Wang Wei sleeping in his beloved bamboo grove without a mosquito net. In all probability Tao sold any chrysanthemums he did not need to a florist, and Wang made money out of the government by selling bamboo shoots to the local greengrocer. That is the sort of person I am. However much I may be enthralled by the lark and the rape blossoms, I am still mortal enough to have no desire to camp out in the middle of the mountains.
The 'Southern hills' and the 'bamboo grove', the skylark and the rape-blossom possess a character all their own, which is vastly different from that of humanity. Nevertheless, I should like, as nearly as possible, to view people from the same standpoint as I view the world of pure poetry. Bassho found ever the sight of a horse urinating near his pillow elegant enough to write a Hokku about. I too from now on will regard everyone I meet, farmer, tradesman, village clerk, old man and old woman alike, as no more than a component feature of the overall canvas of Nature.
See abstracting nature[1]
It may turn out that the most powerful and the most destructive change of modern times has been a change in language: the rise of the image, or metaphor, of the machine. Until the industrial revolution occurred in the minds of most of the people in the so-called developed countries, the dominant images were organic: They had to do with living things; they were biological pastoral, agricultural, or familial. God was seen as a "shepherd," the faithful as "the sheep of His pasture." One's home country was known as one's "motherland." Certain people were said to have the strength of a lion, the grace of a deer, the speed of a falcon, the cunning of a fox, etc. Jesus spoke of himself as a "bridegroom." People who took good care of the earth were said to practice "husbandry." The ideal relationships among people were "brotherhood" and "sisterhood."
Now we do not flinch to hear men and women referred to as "units" as if they were as uniform and interchangeable as machine parts. It is common, and considered acceptable, to refer to the mind as a computer: one's thoughts are "inputs"; other people's responses are "feedback." And the body is thought of as a machine; it is said, for instance, to use food as "fuel"; and the best workers and athletes are praised by being compared to machines. Work is judged almost exclusively now by its "efficiency," which, as used, is a mechanical standard, or by its profitability, which is our only trusted index of mechanical efficiency. One's country is no longer loved familially and intimately as a "motherland," but rather priced according to it's "productivity" of "raw materials" and "natural resources"--valued, that is, strictly according to its ability to keep the machines running. And recently R. Buckminster fuller asserted that "the universe physically is itself the most incredible technology"--the necessary implication being that God is not father, shepherd, or bridegroom, but a mechanic, operating by principles which, according to Fuller, "can only be expressed mathematically."
All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious are due to the "objects" of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought. In either case they elicit from us a reaction; and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even stronger. The memory of an insult may make us angrier than the insult did when we received it. We are frequently more ashamed of our blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them; and in general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence on our action than ideas of remoter facts.
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As time, space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.
Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. The give its "nature," as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is "what" it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception.
The absolute determinability of our mind by abstraction is one of the cardinal facts of our human constitution. Polarizing and magnetizing us as they do, we turn towards them and form them, we seek them, hold them, hate them, bless them, just as if they were so many concrete beings. And beings they are, beings as real in the realm which they inhabit as the changing things of sense are in the realm of space.
See what exists[2], the nature of something[3], and abstractions make us human[4].
Deliver us, we beseech thee, in our several callings, from the service of mammon, that we may do the work which thou givest us to do, in truth, in beauty, and in righteousness, with singleness of heart as thy servants, and to the benefit of our fellow men
Last updated Sun Jun 26 2022 in Berkeley, CA
1: /thought/abstracting-nature.gmi
3: /thought/the-nature-of-something.gmi
4: /thought/abstractions-make-us-human.gmi