miracles of scrutiny

 

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In certain regions of the far north, where the dust content of the atmosphere is close to zero, light is able to move unscattered through the air. In such places, under such conditions, far away objects can often appear uncannily close at hand to the observer. 

The lichen patterns on a boulder can be seen from a hundred yards, cormorants on a sea-stack seem within reach of touch. 

Distance enables miracles of scrutiny; remoteness is a medium of clarification.


—Robert Macfarlane
Landmarks (a treasure)
Chapter 7, on Barry Lopez' Arctic Dreams
(another treasure)

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When we say that the world is knowable, i.e. that knowledge as such exists, we state through this fact itself the tenet of the essential unity of the world or its knowability. 

We declare that the world is not a mosaic, where a plurality of worlds which are essentially strangers to one another are fitted together, but that it is an organism - all of whose parts are governed by the same principle, revealing it and allowing reduction to it. 

The relationship of everything and of all beings is the conditio sine qua non of their knowability.


—Anonymous (Valentin Tomberg
Meditations on the Tarot

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