I am currently (re)reading Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, one of the most stimulating and engaging pieces of intellectual thought I have ever encountered. It is definitely a product of its age, but for every time the essay rubs against current thinking, the benefits of man conquering nature and similar comments (although if one thinks of it, who are we to pretend that our environmental ethos is anything more than talk; Freud and his contemporaries were much more ecological than we are, if only for structural reasons), it offers multiple insights that have not only stood the test of time, but have become such fundamental parts of our daily understanding of life and the world that they have become invisible. So I enjoy being reminded of them by picking the book up and slowly reading through it every few years.
It so happened that I was reading a paragraph on beauty just now, and then got up from my chair to glance out the glass doors of my cottage. The rapid juxtaposition is fitting because it produced in me that nice feeling when the thing that one is reading combines with one's surroundings to create an all encompassing experience. Fittingly, the passage comes just after a section in which Freud notes that happiness occurs only in brief flits here and there, and is not something that can be sustained, because by its very nature it is strongest when it comes suddenly after a period of repressed desire, which of course was one of the key insights of his work. This could be as simple as the rush of relief one feels upon drinking a glass of water after working for many hours in the sun, but of course Freud, a biologist of the mind as Louis Menand refers to him, saw this dynamic at work in registers beyond the biological: cultural, social, political and others.
In the passage on beauty, Freud says that it, or rather our appreciation of it, does not do much to protect us from suffering, but it does a great deal to alleviate its symptoms. And what I saw when I looked out the window was a very common phenomenon of late afternoons in the Bay Area, and I am sure in many other places, the arrival of a cooling breeze off of the water. And what struck me most about this occurrence is how the wind is made visible and sensible, encased as I was behind glass doors, only by its effect on things in the environment, foremost among them the many trees and shrubs and grass and other plants that proliferate on my little street.
I think there is nothing more beautiful than the gentle swaying, swinging and fluttering that the wind causes when it rushes by and through the plants, the movement it produces as well as its unique sound, and I am always struck by it no matter how many times I have experienced it in the past. This makes me think that this, too, taps into an essential aspect of being human, perhaps of being an animal, or an entity of any kind (why of all instances would I leave plants out of the mix now?), just as the stooped engagement with the earth, or being down on hands and knees, produces a similar connection to the world, between habitant and habitat, only with earth rather than with wind.
What is so humbling is that to experience the wind rushing through the trees seems to make everything all right, and it costs nothing, except a little time and attention, and the insight to appreciate what a gift it is.
I will have to amend my thinking on the wind, having called it inanimate in the past, because what could be more in possession of an anima than the wind, which more than any other feature in the landscape, embodies the very spirit of the word and idea itself?
It so happened that I was reading a paragraph on beauty just now, and then got up from my chair to glance out the glass doors of my cottage. The rapid juxtaposition is fitting because it produced in me that nice feeling when the thing that one is reading combines with one's surroundings to create an all encompassing experience. Fittingly, the passage comes just after a section in which Freud notes that happiness occurs only in brief flits here and there, and is not something that can be sustained, because by its very nature it is strongest when it comes suddenly after a period of repressed desire, which of course was one of the key insights of his work. This could be as simple as the rush of relief one feels upon drinking a glass of water after working for many hours in the sun, but of course Freud, a biologist of the mind as Louis Menand refers to him, saw this dynamic at work in registers beyond the biological: cultural, social, political and others.
In the passage on beauty, Freud says that it, or rather our appreciation of it, does not do much to protect us from suffering, but it does a great deal to alleviate its symptoms. And what I saw when I looked out the window was a very common phenomenon of late afternoons in the Bay Area, and I am sure in many other places, the arrival of a cooling breeze off of the water. And what struck me most about this occurrence is how the wind is made visible and sensible, encased as I was behind glass doors, only by its effect on things in the environment, foremost among them the many trees and shrubs and grass and other plants that proliferate on my little street.
I think there is nothing more beautiful than the gentle swaying, swinging and fluttering that the wind causes when it rushes by and through the plants, the movement it produces as well as its unique sound, and I am always struck by it no matter how many times I have experienced it in the past. This makes me think that this, too, taps into an essential aspect of being human, perhaps of being an animal, or an entity of any kind (why of all instances would I leave plants out of the mix now?), just as the stooped engagement with the earth, or being down on hands and knees, produces a similar connection to the world, between habitant and habitat, only with earth rather than with wind.
What is so humbling is that to experience the wind rushing through the trees seems to make everything all right, and it costs nothing, except a little time and attention, and the insight to appreciate what a gift it is.
I will have to amend my thinking on the wind, having called it inanimate in the past, because what could be more in possession of an anima than the wind, which more than any other feature in the landscape, embodies the very spirit of the word and idea itself?
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