The Qualities of Nature

Sorry for my absence here. I’m ill in bed. Not the little sickness, which asks for bed and tea and a stack of books and reading all day – that doesn’t happen anymore, with a child too young to care yet: it feels like too much of an indulgence. No, a more serious illness, with much coughing and moaning and strange feversleep, and… okay, I admit it, one, only one book: A Sand County Almanac.

Reading the Almanac is a yearly ritual, mostly in winter (along with Rick Bass’ Winter, which I often also read in summer). It is so full of gems and today, half awake, I read this one and I know I had to stir enough so as to share just one of them with you:

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. (p.96)

Well, food for thought! But the thinking will have to wait for this here addled brain…

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