“It is a pitiful degeneracy in our modern life that we
are not more often transported out of ourselves by the eternal things that
surround us.
Consider the wind! One of the best tests you can
apply to yourself as to whether you are lost to the primeval grandeur of the
world, taking it all for granted, is to note your attitude to the arbitrary
motions of the wind. Do you take the wind for granted?
Do you only
notice it at all if it is wildly furious, madly violent, bitterly freezing?
Or, on the other hand, is the least breath of it upon your face like the
touch of the remote Past?
Do you never feel it without thinking what a
miraculous phenomenon it is, this invisible and yet most living presence, as it
moves over the city, over the land, over the sea? Nothing can excel the
wind in awakening from the depths of our natures those far-away memories which
seem to carry with them the very essence of life..."
John Cowper Powys
(1872-1963)
A Philosophy of Solitude
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