Trees, Going, Going, Gone! |
Life of the Fields
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| I cannot leave it; I must stay
under the old tree in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and the song
in the very air. I seem as if I could feel all the glowing life the sunshine gives and the
south wind calls to being. The endless grass, the endless leaves, the immense strength of
the oak expanding, the unalloyed joy of finch and blackbird; from them all I receive a
little. Each gives me something of the pure joy they gather for themselves... The
exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendor of life, yields a new thought with every
petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really
live... These are the only hours that are not wasted -- these hours that absorb the soul
and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.
Does this reverie of flowers and waterfall and song form an ideal, a human ideal, in the
mind? It does; much the same ideal that Phidias sculptured of man and woman filled with a
godlike sense of the violet fields of Greece, beautiful beyond thought, calm as my
turtle-dove before the lurid lightning of the unknown. To be beautiful and to be calm,
without mental fear, is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think
it. ©Richard Jefferies, Life of the Fields [from James: 1952:73] Quotation Source: Joseph James (Ed.). (1952?). The Way of Mysticism: An Anthology. New York: Harper and Brothers. |
