Typically, a portray in phrases is price a thousand photos. I take into consideration this increasingly more, in our compulsively visible tradition, which more and more reduces what we predict and really feel and see — who and what we’re — to what may be photographed. I consider Susan Sontag, who known as it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century earlier than Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I supply The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a stunning picture in phrases drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with magnificence and feeling past what a visible picture might convey.
By Maria Popova
There’s singular magic to seeing a mass of creatures transfer in unison alongside the vector of a standard function, as if commanded by a single thoughts. In these final cases of unselfing, we’re reminded that each one of nature is one grand synchrony, by which we’re mere particles current in conviviality and consanguinity with each different particle.
A century and a half earlier than Richard Powers painted in phrases the majestic migration of sandhill cranes, Walt Whitman (Might 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) channels one such spectacle of humbling grandeur in Specimen Days (public library) — the beautiful assortment of prose fragments that additionally gave us his reflections on democracy, music, and the wisdom of trees.
Beneath the heading “BIRDS MIGRATING AT MIDNIGHT,” Whitman writes:
Did you ever probability to listen to the midnight flight of birds passing via the air and darkness overhead, in numerous armies, altering their early or late summer season habitat? It’s one thing to not be forgotten. A pal known as me up simply after 12 final evening to mark the peculiar noise of unusually immense flocks migrating north (fairly late this yr.) Within the silence, shadow and scrumptious odor of the hour, (the pure fragrance belonging to the evening alone,) I assumed it uncommon music. You can hear the attribute movement — a couple of times “the frenzy of mighty wings,” however oftener a velvety rustle, lengthy drawn out — generally fairly close to — with continuous calls and chirps, and a few song-notes. All of it lasted from 12 until after 3. Every now and then the species was plainly distinguishable; I might make out the bobolink, tanager, Wilson’s thrush, white-crown’d sparrow, and infrequently from excessive within the air got here the notes of the plover.
Complement with Whitman, shortly after his paralytic stroke, on what makes life worth living and his everlasting recommendation on living a vibrant and rewarding life, then revisit different enchanting Unphotographables: Henry Williamson on the transcendence of a winter storm; Jack Kerouac on the self-revelation of the windblown world; Georgia O’Keeffe on the grandeur of Machu Picchu; Iris Murdoch on the sea and the stars; an Alpine transcendence with Mary Shelley; an Alaskan paradise with Rockwell Kent.
