Beauty of the Earth
Would snow someday exist only as a memory or as a description in books, if there were still memories or books? He imagined a child reading about snow when none was left to see. Would she not think it something from a dream? How completely unlikely would this whiteness, self-renewed, all-healing seem?. Would she find it any more credible than fairy dust or unicorns or dragons?
Would snow someday exist only as a memory or as a description in books, if there were still memories or books? He imagined a child reading about snow when none was left to see. Would she not think it something from a dream? How completely unlikely would this whiteness, self-renewed, all-healing seem?. Would she find it any more credible than fairy dust or unicorns or dragons?
The beauties of the earth are mundane only because they are daily and so easily to be found. We grow accustomed to them as we do to age, where the gradations of decay, made invisible by their slowness, buffer the shock that instant realization would give. Had these beauties never existed, imagining them would seem madness. The blue of a January sky, the cinnamon a January sunset casts on trees, the flash of a red-wing’s shoulder, black, red, the slice of lemon catalyst for that chromatic explosion. Perception develops in us too gradually for us to taste the full flavors of the earth. We are inoculated against them. The passage of time is prophylactic. By the time we are mature enough to appreciate the earth’s beauty, it is too late. By then it has become common, caviar for a jaded king. Could a human be born innocent of experience and yet fully perceptive and apprehensive, like someone fully sighted but reared in a dark cave yanked out into the sunshine, the colors of this earth would smite and strike him blind.
The beauties of the earth are mundane only because they are daily and so easily to be found. We grow accustomed to them as we do to age, where the gradations of decay, made invisible by their slowness, buffer the shock that instant realization would give. Had these beauties never existed, imagining them would seem madness. The blue of a January sky, the cinnamon a January sunset casts on trees, the flash of a red-wing’s shoulder, black, red, the slice of lemon catalyst for that chromatic explosion. Perception develops in us too gradually for us to taste the full flavors of the earth. We are inoculated against them. The passage of time is prophylactic. By the time we are mature enough to appreciate the earth’s beauty, it is too late. By then it has become common, caviar for a jaded king. Could a human be born innocent of experience and yet fully perceptive and apprehensive, like someone fully sighted but reared in a dark cave yanked out into the sunshine, the colors of this earth would smite and strike him blind.