There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature...yes, that's it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are - vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth - and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the profound connection and humility we experience in the presence of nature, particularly trees.
Muriel Barbery's quote emphasizes the deep emotional resonance that trees evoke within us, symbolizing both our humility and our capacity for appreciation in the face of nature's grandeur. It suggests that while we often view ourselves as insignificant in the vastness of the natural world, we are also capable of profound respect and gratitude for the beauty surrounding us, reminding us of our role within the ecosystem and the importance of honoring it.
In practice
This quote can be used as part of a speech on environmental conservation.
Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
Sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.... my cheeks recalled the effects of its profound caress.
If, in our world, there is any chance of becoming the person you haven't yet become...will I know how to seize that chance, turn my life into a garden that will be completely different from my forebears'?
Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.
We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.
Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers: It is the only prayer that deserves an answer—good, honest, noble work.
[About reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, age 14, in the back seat of his parents' sedan. I almost threw up. I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren't raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals. [That a corporation would create a product that didn't operate as advertised] was shocking in a way we weren't inured to.
Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered...sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks.
What if you have seen it before, ten thousand times over? An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty.
The sky slowly pulled up its blue dress to reveal night.
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