JOHN UPDIKE ON STORYTELLING January 30, 2009
Posted by thenaturalist in Rhythm/Rhythms, Storytelling, Time.add a comment
In “Why I Write” from Picked-Up Pieces, John Updike says, “Storytelling, for all its powers of depiction, shares with music the medium of time, and perhaps its genius, its most central transformation, has to do with time, with rhythm and echo and the sense of time not frozen as in a painting but channeled and harnessed as in a symphony….”
ALDO LEOPOLD ON HISTORY February 24, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Aldo Leopold, History, Time.add a comment
Also Leopold had an interesting view of history as not linear but successive. He said, “All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.”
WHAT’S WRONG WITH US February 16, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Interesting, Nature/Natural History, Phenology, Time.add a comment
D. H. Lawrence wrote: “Blood knowledge…Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of Love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots.”
TIME January 1, 2005
Posted by thenaturalist in Time.add a comment
French philosopher Henri Bergson once said, “Time is resistance against everything happening at once.” I wonder if that’s why I’m so obsessed with timelines, chronologies, dates, beginnings, and endings? Anyhow, it’s one of my favorite quotations, and I memorized it the first time I read it.
RATIO OF DAY TO NIGHT September 1, 2001
Posted by thenaturalist in Nature/Natural History, Phenology, Time.add a comment
In his new introduction to our co-written revision of The Vermont Life Guide to Fall Foliage (2001), Charles Johnson says: “Plants base two of their most fundamental yearly cycles, flowering and dormancy, on the length of days and nights. The amount of daylight they receive is the only true constant in their passage through the years, in their evolution over eons. Everything else is changeable, less predictable, such as weather, soil conditions, even long-term climate. These they may adapt to, but the ratio of day to night is the rhythm of their existence, the great timekeeper.”
HOWEVER September 6, 1975
Posted by thenaturalist in Interesting, Time.add a comment
HOWEVER
In the final paragraph of her memoir, An Unfinished Woman, Lillian Hellman says: “But I am not yet old enough to like the past better than the present, although there are nights when I have a passing sadness for the unnecessary pains, the self-made foolishness that was, is, and will be. I do regret that I have spent too much of my life trying to find what I called ‘truth,’ trying to find what I called ’sense.’ I never knew what I meant by truth, never made the sense I hoped for. All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time. However.” This quotation has haunted me since I first read it because I do waste a lot of time worrying and wondering….
