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The Further We Distance Ourselves From The Spell Of The Present, Explored By Our Senses, The Harder It Will Be To Understand And Protect Nature's Precarious Balance, Let Alone The Balance Of Our Own Human Nature.

-Diane Ackerman

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The Further We Distance

Diane Ackerman

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The Further We Distance Ourselves From The Spell Of The Present, Explored By Our Senses, The Harder It Will Be To Understand And Protect Nature's Precarious Balance, Let Alone The Balance Of Our Own Human Nature.

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Ecstasy Is What Everyone Craves - Not Love Or Sex, But A Hot-blooded, Soaring Intensity, In Which Being Alive Is A Joy And A Thrill. That Enravishment Doesn't Give Meaning To Life, And Yet Without It Life Seems Meaningless.

Despite Not Knowing If What He Felt From Moment To Moment Would Pass Or Last Forever, He Entered Fully Into His Shifting States Of Violent Rage, Self-pity, Longing, Heartbreak, Cynicism, Without Losing The Ability To Think About What Was Happening To Him. That Took Courage, I Thought, Living With The Suffering In A Mindful Way, As An Artifact Of Being, Neither Good Nor Bad.

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We Humans Are Obsessed With Lights...perhaps It Is Our Way Of Hurling The Constellations Back At The Sky.

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No Matter How Politely One Says It, We Owe Our Existence To The Farts Of Blue-green Algae.

And Yet, Words Are The Passkeys To Our Souls. Without Them, We Can't Really Share The Enormity Of Our Lives.

When I Set A Glass Prism On A Windowsill And Allow The Sun To Flood Through It, A Spectrum Of Colors Dances On The Floor. What We Call "white" Is A Rainbow Of Colored Rays Packed Into A Small Space. The Prism Sets Them Free. Love Is The White Light Of Emotion.

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It's Animal By Animal That You Save A Species.

Couples Are Jigsaw Puzzles That Hang Together By Touching In Just Enough Points.

I Think That Very Often Younger Writers Don't Appreciate How Much Hard Work Is Involved In Writing. The Part Of Writing That's Magic Is The Thinnest Rind On The World Of Creation. Most Of A Writer's Life Is Just Work. It Happens To Be A Kind Of Work That The Writer Finds Fulfilling In The Same Way That A Watchmaker Can Happily Spend Countless Hours Fiddling Over The Tiny Cogs And Bits Of Wire. ... I Think The People Who End Up Being Writers Are People Who Don't Get Bored Doing That Kind Of Tight Focus In Small Areas.

I Watched Her Face Switch Among The Radio Stations Of Memory

History Is An Agreed-upon Fiction.

Nothing Is More Memorable Than A Smell. One Scent Can Be Unexpected, Momentary And Fleeting, Yet Conjure Up A Childhood Summer Beside A Lake In The Mountains...

We're Losing Biodiversity Globally At An Alarming Rate, And We Need A Cornucopia Of Different Plants And Animals, For The Planet's Health And Our Own.

In The Early Years Of The Uprising, We Survived On One Meal A Day Of Horse Meat And Soup, But By The End We Ate Only Dried Peas, Dogs, Cats And Birds.

We Evolved As Creatures Knitted Into The Fabric Of Nature, And Without Its Intimate Truths, We Can Find Ourselves Unraveling.

I Try To Give Myself Passionately, Totally, To Whatever I'm Observing, With As Much Affectionate Curiosity As I Can Muster, As A Means Of Understanding A Little Better What Being Human Is.

A Flower's Fragrance Declares To All The World That It Is Fertile, Available, And Desirable, Its Sex Organs Oozing With Nectar. Its Smell Reminds Us In Vestigial Ways Of Fertility, Vigor, Life-force, All The Optimism, Expectancy, And Passionate Bloom Of Youth. We Inhale Its Ardent Aroma And, No Matter What Our Ages, We Feel Young And Nubile In A World Aflame With Desire.

There Is A Way Of Beholding Nature Which Is A Form Of Prayer, A Way Of Minding Something With Such Clarity And Aliveness That The Rest Of The World Recedes. It . . . Gives The Brain A Small Vacation.

Habitats Keep Evolving New Pageants Of Species, And We Shouldn't Interfere.

One Can Live At A Low Flame. Most People Do. For Some, Life Is An Exercise In Moderation (best China Saved For Special Occasions), But Given Something Like Death, What Does It Matter If One Looks Foolish Now And Then, Or Tries Too Hard, Or Cares Too Deeply?

Complexity Excites The Mind, And Order Rewards It. In The Garden, One Finds Both, Including Vanishingly Small Orders Too Complex To Spot, And Orders So Vast The Mind Struggles To Embrace Them.

As A Species, We've Somehow Survived Large And Small Ice Ages, Genetic Bottlenecks, Plagues, World Wars And All Manner Of Natural Disasters, But I Sometimes Wonder If We'll Survive Our Own Ingenuity.

Smell Brings To Mind... A Family Dinner Of Pot Roast And Sweet Potatoes During A Myrtle-mad August In A Midwestern Town. Smells Detonate Softly In Our Memory Like Poignant Land Mines Hidden Under The Weedy Mass Of Years.

I Think If You Look At Any Facet Of Nature In Enough Detail, You Find It Fascinating. How Could You Not? The Universe Is So Full Of Marvels. Here's An Example -- Rain, The Shape Of Rain. I Was Minding My Own Business, Working On My Book, Looking Out The Window, And It Was Raining And I Was Noticing That The Raindrops Were Falling In That Classic Round-looking Way, And I Thought, 'i Wonder If Raindrops Really Are Round?' So I Started Researching It A Little, And I Discovered That Raindrops Change Shape 300 Times A Second.

Poetry Is An Act Of Distillation. It Takes Contingency Samples, Is Selective. It Telescopes Time. It Focuses What Most Often Floods Past Us In A Polite Blur.

Flight Is Nothing But An Attitude In Motion.

An Animal On A Leash Is Not Tamed By The Owner. The Owner Is Extending Himself Through The Leash To That Part Of His Personality Which Is Pure Dog, That Part Of Him Which Just Wants To Eat, Sleep, Bark, Hump Chairs, Wet The Floor In Joy, And Drink Out Of A Toilet Bowl.

What Do Those Of Us Who Aren't Tall, Flawlessly Sculpted Adolescents Do? Answer: Console Ourselves With How Relative Beauty Can Be... Thank Heavens For The Arousing Qualities Of Zest, Intelligence, Wit, Curiosity, Sweetness, Passion, Talent And Grace.

Nature Is Also Great Fun. To Pretend That Nature Isn't Fun Is To Miss Much Of The Joy Of Being Alive.

A Poem Records Emotions And Moods That Lie Beyond Normal Language, That Can Only Be Patched Together And Hinted At Metaphorically.

Nothing Reveals More About The Inner Life Of A People Than Their Arts.

For If I Do Something, I Never Do It Thoughtlessly.

To Begin To Understand The Gorgeous Fever That Is Consciousness, We Must Try To Understand The Senses And What They Can Tell Us About The Ravishing World We Have The Privilege To Inhabit.

Human Beings Are Sloshing Sacks Of Chemicals On The Move.

Horses Have Made Civilization Possible.

When You Consider Something Like Death, After Which (there Being No News Flash To The Contrary) We May Well Go Out Like A Candle Flame, Then It Probably Doesn't Matter If We Try Too Hard, Are Awkward Sometimes, Care For One Another Too Deeply, Are Excessively Curious About Nature, Are Too Open To Experience, Enjoy A Nonstop Expense Of The Senses In An Effort To Know Life Intimately And Lovingly.

Home Is Where The Heart Is, We Say, Rubbing The Flint Of One Abstraction Against Another.

Home Is Where The Heart Is

Because Poets Feel What We're Afraid To Feel, Venture Where We're Reluctant To Go, We Learn From Their Journeys Without Taking The Same Dramatic Risks.

As The Most Social Apes, We Inhabit A Mirror-world In Which Every Important Relationship, Whether With Spouse, Friend Or Child, Shapes The Brain, Which In Turn Shapes Our Relationships.

Important Relationships

So Before I Start Work On A Book, I'm Like A Pregnant Mole - I Obsessively Tidy And Order My Closets And Everything In My Study. Because There's Such A Cascade Of Images And Ideas That I'm Grapping With Mentally, I Couldn't Also Be In A Chaotic Setting.

The Great Affair, The Love Affair With Life, Is To Live As Variously As Possible, To Groom One's Curiosity Like A High-spirited Thoroughbred, Climb Aboard, And Gallop Over The Thick, Sunstruck Hills Every Day.

Love Is Like A Batik Created From Many Emotional Colors, It Is A Fabric Whose Pattern And Brightness May Vary.

Give A Man Enough Rope And He'll Wrap Himself Around Your Little Finger.

Our Sense Of Safety Depends On Predictability, So Anything Living Outside The Usual Rules We Suspect To Be An Outlaw, A Ghoul.

If Cynicism Is Inevitable As One Ages, So Is The Yearning For Innocence. To Children Heaven Is Being An Adult, And To Adults Heaven Is Being Children Again.

Culture Is What People Invent When They Have Lost Nature.

There Are Well-dressed Foolish Ideas Just As There Are Well-dressed Fools.

As Fleeting Emotions Stalk It, A Face Can Leak Fear Or The Guilt Of A Forming Lie.

What Is Erotic? The Acrobatic Play Of The Imagination. The Sea Of Memories In Which We Bathe. The Way We Caress And Worship Things With Our Eyes. Our Willingness To Be Stirred By The Sight Of The Voluptuous. What Is Erotic Is Our Passion For The Liveliness Of Life.

We Ogle Plants And Animals Up Close On Television, The Internet And In The Movies. We May Not Worship The Animals We See, But We Still Regard Them As Necessary Physical And Spiritual Companions. Technological Nature Can't Completely Satisfy That Yearning.

I'm Certainly Not Opposed To Digital Technology, Whose Graces I Daily Enjoy And Rely On In So Many Ways. But I Worry About Our Virtual Blinders.

When I Go Biking, I Am Mentally Far Far Away From Civilization. The World Is Breaking Someone Else's Heart.

The Knowing, I Told Myself, Is Only A Vapor Of The Mind, And Yet It Can Wreck Havok With One's Sanity.

What A Lonely Species We Are, Searching For Signals Of Life From Other Galaxies, Adopting Companion Animals, Visiting Parks And Zoos To Commune With Other Beasts. In The Process, We Discover Our Shared Identity.

Choice Is A Signature Of Our Species.

Writer's Block Is A Luxury Most People With Deadlines Don't Have.

We Can't Enchant The World, Which Makes Its Own Magic; But We Can Enchant Ourselves By Paying Deep Attention

Poetry Had Everything To Teach Me About Life.

Our Relationship With Nature Has Changed Radically, Irreversibly, But By No Means All For The Bad. Our New Epoch Is Laced With Invention. Our Mistakes Are Legion, But Our Talent Is Immeasurable.

I Don't Want To Be A Passenger In My Own Life.

Knowing Who You Are

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