In the beginning was nature. -- Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, first sentence.
by Jerome du Bois
Gary Cruse at the Owner's Manual has posted the latest Best of Me Symphony. He pairs each of the twenty entries with an appropriate quotation from Camille Paglia, my favorite writer by far, and one of this century's smartest people. I would like to add one more powerful passage of hers -- with a brief addendum -- in light of yesterday's gigantic earthquake and tsunami nightmare in East Asia.
I'll set the tone, about the true nature of Nature, with this pungent quote from Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil:
"According to nature" you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power -- how could you live according to this indifference! (p.15)
And here is Camille Paglia:
Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature's coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet's nest of aggression and overkill. . . . Nature is the seething excess of being. (p.28)
Atlas shrugged yesterday, and tens of thousands died. But we humans, too, are part of nature; we, too, strain at the leash of life for more life, for better life. We don't just survive; we flourish.
And so another tectonic shift happened yesterday, in the Ukraine. The ground under Putin and the past is now shaking and uncertain, and another fifty million people begin to turn toward the West, and greater freedom and prosperity.
So let us mourn the dead, and then, afterward, celebrate the victory of the Orange Revolution.
Nothing can stop us, no matter how much the Earth rocks our world.
Posted by Jerome at December 27, 2004 07:00 AM | TrackBack