Brain Food #556
Paying attention to what we tend to overlook
Thoughts of the day
Today would have been Virginia Woolf’s 139th birthday, but her wisdom and hauntingly evocative writing live on.
We are at the dawn of another week, which will surely unravel in ways we had not planned for, which still be engulfed by the toxic spread of negative news. It feels suitable to share a moment from Mrs. Dalloway in which Septimus, an ex-army man suffering the after-effects of war, is suddenly overcome with the beauty he encounters in the world, which is so generously shared with him:
“Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”
Picking a handful of Woolf’s lines without the rest of the work to embrace it seems to be doing her words injustice, but ultimately this is what it means to steal glimpses of the world outside, to focus on the seemingly trivial, and to find beauty in it.
Photographer Terry Evans often picks and preserves natural artifacts she finds in her expeditions, like the leaf above, what she describes as an act of paying attention to what we tend to overlook: “How else can we know where we fit in relationship to everything else in the world, but by seeing it with attention, concentrated sustained attention?”
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