Previous: XXIV. Walking in the country
Walking in a favourite lane to-day, I found it covered with shed blossoms of the hawthorn. Creamy white, fragrant even in ruin, lay scattered the glory of May. It told me that spring is over.
Have I enjoyed it as I should? Since the day that brought me freedom, four times have I seen the year’s new birth, and always, as the violet yielded to the rose, I have known a fear that I had not sufficiently prized this boon of heaven whilst it was with me. Many hours I have spend shut up among my books, when I might have been in the meadows. Was the gain equivalent? Doubtfully, diffidently, I hearken what the mind can plead.
... As I turn to summer, a misgiving mingles with my joy.
Alpha.
This description of nature in the spring, reminds me of similar passages in -- wait for it -- The Magic Mountain. They serve to mark the seasons and the passage of time but also to celebrate nature in an almost Romantic manner. Both Mann and Gissing differ from Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, in that they only gloss the beauties of nature (I will have to confirm this as I read) and not the darker side. Dillard (and Sallie Tisdale, I’m thinking of her The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies in the book The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death) uses insects to show the immorality of nature and our distance, as humans, from that state of nature that we can only see as darkness.
Beta.
The divide between the humane and the natural is, I think, related to the crisis of individuation -- that we are conscious of ourselves as existing outside nature. Nietzsche is focused on this problem throughout The Birth of Tragedy, it is the reason we humans are tragic and why we are in need of tragedy and Dionysian healing. This can be viewed either in Classical (Promethean) terms -- Prometheus either created us as demi-gods to thwart the gods of Olympus or (myths always have multiple versions) he stole and gave us a Divine Spark that achieves the same thing. It was for this crime that his liver was perpetually on the menu, though it is unclear to me if Zeus or mankind was more injured by this “gift” -- or you can view it in Christian terms:
How men torment themselves is all I see. 280
The little god of Earth sticks to the same old way,
And is as strange as on that very first day.
He might appreciate life a little more: he might,
If you [God] hadn’t lent him a gleam of Heavenly light:
He calls it Reason, but only uses it 285
To be more a beast than any beast as yet.
-Mephistopheles - Goethe’s Faust
Again, I’m confused by this quote as Goethe seems to steal from Satan the credit for giving man this doubtful gift, for what else is the “knowledge of good and evil?” Of course he does put this in Mephisto’s mouth, and you really can’t trust that guy. But the rule with myths and poetry seems to be that you can just make anything up as you go along.
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