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John Muir
The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.
What passes through the gemstone
Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), a German poet and translator, asks his reader to look at a gemstone in the third volume of Die Weisheit des Brahmanen. At first sight it appears to have been cast in a single piece. There is no opening in its surface through which anything from the outside might enter. Yet a reader who holds it up to the light has already put that first judgement to the test. Rückert gives two lines to this small experience.
What changes when the viewer moves
Yet it does not ward off influence from without;
warmth and light penetrate the impenetrable.– Friedrich Rückert, Die Weisheit des Brahmanen, 1837, p. 91.[1]
In the second line, the German word for “impenetrable” meets the verb “penetrates”. We still hear the first claim as we read the words that qualify it. Rückert goes on to describe the same stone blazing more fiercely at one moment and glowing faintly at another. Even a small cloud enclosed within it appears to change position as the viewer shifts. The cloud is an especially telling detail. The feature that seems most securely locked inside the stone gives away a movement made by the person looking in.
How hard a heart may be
Only after these observations does Rückert speak of the human heart. He grants the reader the very hardness that looked so admirable in the stone. Then he asks whether someone firm in their convictions might still be touched by what goes on around them. The word he chooses is “sympathy”. At the start even a ray of light entering the stone had seemed an impossibility. By the end it is possible to picture somebody moved by another person’s fate while remaining entirely themselves.
My First Summer in the Sierra · p. 319
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