Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) was a French poet. In his prose poem “Aube” the speaker meets a summer dawn on foot. The landscape does not simply wait for him to describe it.
At first nothing stirs before the palaces. Breath enters the scene as the speaker starts walking. The sentence brings in breaths, jewels and wings in succession without explaining the transitions.
I walked on, waking the living, warm breaths; and the jewels looked, and wings rose without a sound.
– Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres de Arthur Rimbaud: vers et proses, p. 185.[1]
Ordinarily a jewel would be what a passer-by looks at in the morning light. A single verb reverses the direction. For an instant the world meets the gaze instead of submitting to it.
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Believe one who has tried: you shall find a fuller satisfaction in the woods than in books. The trees and the rocks will teach you that which you cannot hear from masters.
Bernhard von Clairvaux (1090/91–1153)
English translation by Samuel J. Eales
Such stillness! Into the rocks sinks the voice of the cicadas.
The age of bodies lies in their rigidity. Every act of becoming solid is a process of time, of history.
Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810)
Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers · p. 81
Our translation
A crystal grows together more deftly and regularly than a bee builds or a spider weaves.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803)
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit · p. 163
Our translation
Give the crystal the power of forming ideas. Its highest plan for the world will be crystallisation, its divinity the most beautiful form a crystal can take.
The water of crystallisation that holds the structure together is the tear of a moment. Once it has dried up, the structure has fallen apart.
In blue crystal The pale man dwells, his cheek leaning against his stars; Or he bows his head in purple sleep.
But the earth’s shaping power does not confine itself to one figure. It knows the whole of geometry and is practised in it.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630)
Strena seu de nive sexangula · 1611 · p. 23
Our translation from the Latin
Having rejected all these views, we say with Constantine and certain others that the power of a stone arises from its very kind and substantial form.
Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280)
De mineralibus · 1519 · unpaginated
Our translation from the Latin. Abbreviations in the source text expanded.
Many of those mineral crystallisations, such as clusters of spar, glass-head ore and flowers of iron, often yield forms as beautiful as art could ever conceive; and the glory in the cave of Antiparos is merely the product of water seeping through beds of gypsum.
Yet it does not ward off influence from without; warmth and light penetrate the impenetrable.
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