All writing is obsessed with perfection, to an almost frightening extent. There is an elegance demanded in all our work, and this elegance is frequently heralded by the untamed beasts we call obsession and pride and fear. We are terrified and yet enchanted by the notion of anonymity, the ultimate carnivore of history, the invisible beast we utilize all our powers to fend off. As writers, we craft the future quotes, the witty responses, the little euphemisms and jokes people will attribute to us. But despite our vain reasons, this is an ideological war we fight, a battle to tame the chaos of our existence. We are all of us, Aldous Huxley to Walt Whitman engaged in a battle for our sanity, and no greater foe exists than that terrifying entity we refer to as Nature.
We regularly look to nature to inspire that elegance, though I often fear Mother Nature makes for a vain muse. She is cruel and sloppy and ill-accustomed to guests. She makes you claim her bounties by force, and causes you to fill shame for it. We are vicious brutes when we accept her delights and ignorant prudes when we abstain. We regularly envision ourselves as her conquistadors or liberators, though I suspect, like most muses, Mother Nature cares little what she inspires in us.
It is this infinite apathy that makes her such a perfect subject for our art. The spider slaughtering the flies, the doe nursing her child, the curious raccoon as it wanders through our trash… I myself have a tremendous affinity for tales of Man attempting and failing to overcome his own nature, and the nature of the world. Moby-Dick, Don Quijote, Aguirre, Blood Meridian, the reveries of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. .. Why do we, as a species, insist on attempting to define the undefinable, only to find ourselves defined in turn by them?
Ask this guy.
We regularly look to nature to inspire that elegance, though I often fear Mother Nature makes for a vain muse. She is cruel and sloppy and ill-accustomed to guests. She makes you claim her bounties by force, and causes you to fill shame for it. We are vicious brutes when we accept her delights and ignorant prudes when we abstain. We regularly envision ourselves as her conquistadors or liberators, though I suspect, like most muses, Mother Nature cares little what she inspires in us.
It is this infinite apathy that makes her such a perfect subject for our art. The spider slaughtering the flies, the doe nursing her child, the curious raccoon as it wanders through our trash… I myself have a tremendous affinity for tales of Man attempting and failing to overcome his own nature, and the nature of the world. Moby-Dick, Don Quijote, Aguirre, Blood Meridian, the reveries of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. .. Why do we, as a species, insist on attempting to define the undefinable, only to find ourselves defined in turn by them?
Ask this guy.