We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.
The blinding of the stars [due to light pollution] is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlines. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation … And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination.
(Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places, Granta Publications: London, 2007, pp. 202–203)
yes, the world we have made for ourselves, set apart from our origins and kin, makes us unhappy often. no amount of consumer goods can stave off the emptiness of our displacement, even if many of us don't recognise that we are displaced. and that insatiable emptiness drives us to further distance and destroy our world and our souls. we could start to go home tomorrow, if only enough of us decided to do it. the quandary is re-enchanting enough of us, and how do we do that with the ones who don't even know what it is they hunger for? those who don't miss the stars, because they never saw them clearly?
ReplyDeleteI don't know the answers to those questions. I can only hope that beauty, poetry, story, art, that these things have the power to wake people up to what is real, what is being lost, would could be. It all comes down to love in the end, how to make people love the world—the real one, as opposed to the human-made one.
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