Uselessness.

The Compton Oak ...

We shall never fully understand nature or ourselves, and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

John Fowles, from The Tree

Put usefulness first, and you lose it. Put beauty first, and what you do will be useful forever.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Everyone knows how useful usefulness is, but no one seems to know how useful uselessness is.  The carpenter scorns the massive, crooked oak: Its trunk is so distorted, no one can get a straight plank out of it.  It’s not a timber tree—there’s nothing it can be used for. That’s how it got to be that old.  A crooked tree lives its years in peace; a straight one is the first to be cut down.

Chuang Tzu, from Zhuangzi

Uselessness.

Firchau, Drew, Pine Plantation, 2009

We shall never fully understand nature or ourselves, and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.  The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.  We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective.

John Fowles, from The Tree

Swimmings.

Waugh, Ebbing Waters, 1883

The essences. Not the things themselves.

Swimmings of life on the smallest things.

John Fowles

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability - however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.  The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.

John Fowles, from The Tree

Swimmings.

Waugh, Ebbing Waters, 1883

The essences. Not the things themselves.

Swimmings of life on the smallest things.

John Fowles