Caterina’s Reviews > The Morning Star > Status Update

I am thinking..about a great oak tree that stands in the woods behind the house..A remarkable number of birds inhabit it & I commit this thought to the typewriter.The thought has now left my inner being..though I myself remain here..I am & will always be enclosed within my mind & body. .
But what if there is no..division between what is inside a person & what is outside? What if the 2 domains exist in constant flux?

Death is our temporal horizon, unseen by the animals. They, on the other hand, are more closely bound to the moment, and in the Bible's account of the Creation that state is paradisiacal.

But Kierkegaard's abandonment was different. The silence in which one might forget oneself was like the silence of the lily and the bird, they were our teachers, but also like the silence of the forest and the silence of the sea.Even when the sea rages loudly, he wrote, it is nonetheless silent, and these words I read as the sea raged loudly outside the house in which I sat.

But Nietzsche was impossible to read without consideration of the fact that he himself was a loser, weak and alone, and that everything he wrote about will, about power and about strength was to compensate for his own inadequacy.

Why were there two of me? One who said no, and one who egged me on. One who wanted to, and one who did not. How much easier human life would be if inner agreement had been our default setting.

I can't say this has the same je. ne sais quoi as the My Struggle series or the 4 seasons cycle or A Time for Everything. And what a sorry lot of miserable, drunken jerks & violent mentally damaged folks & every bodily function, which I guess emphasizes our nature as animals among the burgeoning weirdness of the greater animal world, with dead & even extinct animals coming back to life.

Overhead, some crows came flying up from the fjord. More followed, and soon the sky was teeming with birds. It was like a curtain of living flesh, I thought to myself, beautiful, shimmering patterns of black and darkest blue that a moment later broke up as the crows began to settle in the line of trees..Upstairs, a window opened & I heard the sound of Line's voice, soft & gentle amid the gruff squawking of the crows.

When I was a child I'd known every tree in the neighborhood.In my mind they were individuals,each with their own particular characteristics..They bent down to me, &their feelings seeped into my consciousness..
Suddenly I saw myself surrounded by great, living creations.Silent &inscrutable,neither hostile nor friendly, &quite without opinion regarding us little people..And they were living creations, not just things..