Sublime

“The ocean is very big and a skiff is small and hard to see,” the old man said. He noticed how pleasant it was to have someone to talk to instead of speaking only to himself and to the sea. “I missed you,” he said. “What did you catch?”

“It is the best of humanity, I think, that goes out to walk. In happy hours all affairs may be wisely postponed for this. Dr. Johnson said, ‘Few men know how to take a walk,’ and it is pretty certain that Dr. Johnson was not one of those few. It is a fine art; there are degrees of proficiency, and we distinguish the professors from the apprentices.

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.

taciturn

Dans le même mouvement, cette Europe philosophante a négligé l’Emerson de La Conduite de la vie, le Thoreau de Walden, les transcendentalistes, le John Muir du Journal de voyage dans l’Arctique, le John Burroughs de Construire sa maison, l’Aldo Leopold de L’Almanach d’un comté des sables.

They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.