25th May, 2015

I have let myself be scatterbrained today. Indeed, I have let myself be so all days of late, and it will not do. This airiness of structure (this absence of structure) is time thrown to the zephyrs. I need to focus. Deliberate, careful, concentrational study, that's what is required. A program of paying attention. 

Seneca advises us to take one thought each day to consider deeply. Just one. One from all the thousands. Wise words. But the tragedy of wisdom is that it always operates so much more smoothly on paper than in practice. In practice it is impossible to know which thought one should concentrate on each day until the day and all its thought-production is through. And the thought that is one's darling in the morning is seldom the same as that which bewitches one in the afternoon, and neither of those comprise the cynosure of the night. 

This morning my chief candidate for thought-of-the-day had to do with the distinction between art and nature. I wanted to determine which of these parties reigned (or should reign) supreme, or whether both governed in coalition over man's aesthetic faculties. In the past I typically sided with Landor (Walter Savage) on this question and loved nature first "and next to nature art." Yet last semester a professor whose opinion I hold in high regard told me that, for him, nature must ever play second fiddle to art, and though this professor did not dilate upon his reasons for believing so, ever since that conversation I have found myself more uncertain of my nature/art hierarchy. Which brings me to my morning walk around Buhl Lake, whereupon, having been mesmerized for several minutes by the painted back of a fire-furred caterpillar on the pathway, I lapsed into a renewed imaginary dialogue with said professor, wherein I tried to win him round to my nature-championing point of view. Yet, much to my puzzlement given that I was both voices in the conversation and was thereby odds-on to succeed in my persuasions, it was not so much the professor that came round to my point of view as it was I that came round to his. I had engineered the ruse (in this imaginary conversation) of having the professor stop by some honeysuckle bush and read one of its leaves as if it were a poem (as if the leaf were the creation of a poet), thinking that this would apprise the professor of the superior complexity and beauty and compositional-perspicacity of nature. But my ruse backfired when the professor pointed out that, in the context of my experiment, it was precisely his familiarity with art that enabled him to recognize the splendors in the leaf in the first place. And dash it all, he was right. I had vowed nature was to art as Hyperion to a satyr, and yet without the satyr art my Hyperion looked set to become a mere mortal.

But these were morning thoughts and it is no longer morning and they no longer fit the hour.