Typically a portray with phrases is price a thousand footage. I give it some thought increasingly, in our visually compulsive tradition, which more and more reduces what we predict, really feel and see – who and what we’re – to what might be photographed. I consider Susan Sontag, who referred to as it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century earlier than Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I supply The unphotographable — Saturdays, a stupendous picture in phrases drawn from centuries of literature: transcendent and significant passages, illustrating landscapes and experiences radiating magnificence and emotion past what a visible picture may convey.
By Maria Popova
“Beholding the teeming lifetime of the shore,” wrote Rachel Carson in her gorgeous meditation on the ocean and the that means of life, “we have now an uneasy sense of the communication of a common reality that lies simply past past our attain…the last word thriller of Life itself.”
This thriller involves life by way of the lens of the standard and miraculous oyster within the opening pages of Rowan Jacobsen’s totally great guide. The Living Shore: rediscovering a lost world (public library), impressed by John Steinbeck’s forgotten masterpiece The Log from the Sea of Cortez.
Jacobsen writes:
When the complete moon brings the waters again, they emerge, a shimmering band alongside the shore, like washed up doubloons on the wreckage of a Spanish galleon. They hermetically shut their shells and, for just a few hours, develop into earth. Bears creep out of the cedar woods and trample them, biting small fish that linger too lengthy. From a distance you would possibly assume it was glowing rocks, simply one other paved seaside, slightly than acres of residing shoreline. However should you stepped out of your boat and explored the previous seashells gently bursting beneath your boots, you’d scent their aroma of salty mist and listen to the crackle of water droplets drifting away and know they had been the residing sea itself. even, clinging to the bottom to stop it from squirming. And should you would sit amongst them and crack open some shells and pour the brackish flesh in your mouth, you would possibly get a way of what it had all the time been like.
Then the moon lets go and the water returns, meandering alongside the low factors, effervescent like springs below the shells. Quickly they’re lined and so they steadily return to their different existence. They open their shells and drink from the ocean. The bears retreat and the purple sixteen-armed starfish make their technique to the sting of the rising tide, gobbling up as they go. Tiny creatures cover below the shells, contained in the shells, spinning small lives in a biogenic world. For just a few hours, they disappear below the waves. What should you arrived at excessive tide and did not take the time to delve into it, or should you got here from a spot the place land and water had already peeled off and also you assumed the world you knew was the one which had all the time been, you then’d most likely go on, and also you’d by no means even know they existed.
Full with oyster optimism, then revisit different spellbinding Unphotographables: Henry Williamson on the transcendence of a winter storm; Jack Kerouac on the self-revelation of the windblown world; Richard Powers on the majestic migration of sandhill cranes; Georgia O’Keeffe on the grandeur of Machu Picchu; Iris Murdoch on the Sea and the Stars; an alpine transcendence with Mary Shelley; an Alaskan paradise with Rockwell Kent.
#Moon #Tide #Dwelling #Shore #Marginal