… The forest on the facing slope appears to keep pace with me as I stroll, while all the nearer conifers slide past at their different rates. It’s as though all the trees on that hillside were gliding forward—or is it just the contrast with the nearby woods rushing backward that makes the distant slope seem to stride in the opposite direction?
But wait! What am I saying? None of these trees is actually moving! I alone, among all these upright bodies, am actually locomoting across the ground. All their apparent movements, fast and slow, are merely a consequence of my own physical motion, the illusory effect of my own activity in the midst of what is, in fact, a fairly quiescent and passive topography. “Motion parallax” is the technical term for this dynamism that my own movement seems to induce in the landscape, this apparent roaming of things in relation to myself as I wander.
…
… the trunks move backward in their respective gaits, the farther ones slower and the close ones swifter … and I realize that all this motion is not at all an illusion: it is the way the world lives, the way the world shows itself to itself—for there is NO view from outside! The layered dynamism of all these gliding trajectories has overcome a threshold in my self; my thoughts dissolve into my breathing body and I awaken as this striding form, this sentient flesh utterly immersed in the sensuous.
(David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Vintage: New York, 2010, pp. 96 and 97–98)