“Stop. If you’re inside, go to a window. Throw it open and turn your face to the sky. All that empty space, the deep vastness of the air, the heavens wide about you. The sky is full of insects, and all of them are going somewhere. Every day, above and all around us, the collective voyage of billions of beings.
That’s the letter A: the first thing not to forget. There are others worlds around us. Too often, we pass through them unknowing, seeing but blind, hearing but deaf, touching but not feeling, contained by the limits of our senses, the banality of our imaginations, our Ptolemaic certitudes.” -H. Raffles, Insectopedia
I understand the urge to stop and go to a window, to stop and go outside into the sunlight, the urge to see the sky, the urge to feel nature. It’s humbling, then, to realize that these senses have limits – there is so much invisible to the eyes and un-feelable to the skin. It seems even sensuous knowledge cannot fill all the gaps of human epistemology.
As it is, we too often don’t take this time to pause, too look up at the sky, to take a deep breath of air. I feel this in graduate school a lot, always on-the-go, always something I should be doing. If we live in such a way that we don’t even take the time to feel nature, to sense nature — what happens to that which we can’t even sense? In other words, Raffles is justly concerned with the ways in which we are “contained by the limits of our senses” — and yet, imagine the ways this limitation is heightened by our dismissal of that which we can sense, but don’t.
[These were taken during my recent visit home, Dec 2011.]
