"The more childish and unworldly a person’s
disposition is, the more happiness he gets from such simple things as air,
water, sun, earth-mould, sand, leaves, bread, butter, honey, or the still more
primeval sensation of a certain delicious drowsiness in his own limbs.
This is what I mean by my recurrent image of the ichthyosaurus. What I am trying to indicate by “the ichthyosaurus-sensation” is nothing less than this simple primeval
happiness in the immediate experience of being alive.
To blink at that
mysterious god, the sun; to stare at that equivocal goddess, the moon ; to
watch the incredible shapes of the clouds, as they pile up above the horizon ;
to observe in early afternoon, a certain yellowish light upon a brick wall; to
note a certain dark-blue wave of colour, as it sinks down upon the roofs of a
city after sunset; to catch the ink- black silhouettes of bare branches against a November sky, just before the
windows are lamp-lit in a roadside village ; to feel the ploughed-up earth
under your feet, and a cold wet wind upon your face ; to sit over a fire of
wood or of red, coals, thinking the long thoughts of vague race-memories—all
these things, belonging to a world of psychic-physical sensations that go back
to the beginnings of consciousness, are
the stuff of which the secret of life is made."
John Cowper Powys
In Defense of Sensuality
