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Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shape-shifters and magical re-inventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

Diane Ackerman

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Only the inaccessible and elusive is truly alluring, Proust says. And what could be more inaccessible and elusive than the past? Each person is attracted over and over again to a predictable "type" of lover. Each has a habitual pattern of loving and of losing: "the men who have been left by a number of women have been left almost always in the same manner because of their character and of certain always identical reactions which can be calculated: each man has his own way of being betrayed." For Proust, love is a conscious, deeply creative act of communion with memory, reaching into and through the beloved to all of life. As he says, "The fact is that the person counts for little or nothing; what is almost everything is the series of emotions, of agonies which similar mishaps have made us feel in the past in connection with her." We do not love people for themselves, or objectively; quite the contrary, "we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears...they are only a vast and vague place in which our affections take root...It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind." Accordingly, it is only because we need people in order to feel love that we fall in love.

An Alchemy of Mind

Diane Ackerman

#diane ackerman #philosophy

Many violinists and violin makers insist that violins grow into their beautiful throaty sounds, and that a violin played exquisitely for a long time eventually contains the exquisite sounds within itself...in poetic terms: the wood remembers.

-Diane Ackerman, 'A Natural History of the Senses'

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Composition 10, 1930, Sonia Delaunay

* * * *

The brain is silent, the brain is dark, the brain tastes nothing, the brain hears nothing. All it receives are electrical impulses—not the sumptuous chocolate melting sweetly, not the tingling caress, not the pastels of peach and lavender at sunset over a coral reef—just impulses. — Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

(via human-of-entropy)

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Gli esseri viventi tendono a cambiare in modo irriconoscibile man mano che crescono. Chi potrebbe dedurre che dalla larva nascerà una libellula, dal bocciolo un iris, dal neonato un avvocato? Flora o fauna, siamo tutti mutaforma e magici reinventori. La vita è in realtà un sostantivo plurale, una carovana di sé stessi.

Diane Ackerman

#Diane Ackerman