the poetics of presence

Maria Popova’s blog called The Marginalian is widely known and harks back to what the internet promised before advertising, social media and enshittification took over (another is Jason Kottke’s site).

This is Popova’s post on time and self-transcendence and the work of Richard Jeffries, but as is her style, it covers a lot of ground with links to overlapping ideas previously posted:

The Ecstasy of Eternity: Richard Jefferies on Time and Self-Transcendence

The entire post is worth a read but here are some parts that resonate with this work in Losing Oneself.

A few times a lifetime, if you are lucky, something — an encounter with nature, a work of art, a great love — sparks what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed “an occasion for unselfing,” dismantling the cathedral of illusion and rendering you one with everything that ever was and ever will be.

Crowning his magnificent account of the experience is the revelation that presence — this prayerful attention to the here and now — is the supreme portal to eternity. A generation after Kierkegaard insisted that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity” and a century before Mary Oliver drew on Blake and Whitman to observe that “all eternity is in the moment,” …

And yet it is only through the body — this perishable reliquary of life — that the mind can grasp the abstraction of timelessness; it is only through absolute presence with the aliveness of the moment that the soul can sing with the ecstasy of eternity.


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