The Inexhaustibility Of Things, As They Are In Themselves
We are told that the external, natural world is strictly speaking spiritually sterile and normatively inert. This is a core, background assumption of our instrumentalist culture, which ensnares and ossifies the natural world by way of fitting inside a “disenchanted” frame.
And yet, whether on a long hike or while sitting for hours on a beach, I’m often overwhelmed with a peculiar kind of nostalgia, mixed with melancholy, and with an overall emotional vertigo … at the realization that the objects I encounter, however they happen to be constituted, exist here and now … but have also existed long before me and will continue to exist long after I am gone. Their capacity for renewal and re-formation renders them inexhaustible and bestows them with a bearing of immortality.
Moreover, despite our background mechanistic assumptions, it feels as if these objects have fully developed lives of their own … a kind of existential sovereignty … even though, most of the time, we’re talking not just about actually living things like birds and trees and flowers, but also about water, rocks, mountains, sand, streams, and a vast arrays of other such inanimate natural forms. It’s as if they simply carry on with their quiet existence, apart and away from the cacophony of humanity.
