Alain and books
I can’t remember the context or when it was. Someone sent me an essay by Alain on reading books. Well. It’s about how books might make us feel depressed, and how we should go out into nature instead. Apparently, nature calms us down when it enters our brains through our eyes. How lovely.
I don’t want to engage in cultural relativism here, but I’m interested in the dichotomy between ‘nature’ and ‘intellect’. For one thing, we don’t have ‘nature’. I don’t know what it is. This is because we live in the here and now, and at least as far as European ‘nature’ is concerned, it is domesticated. Without roaming animals, we speak more of a cultural landscape than nature. Of course, I can observe ‘nature’. But what I’m usually looking at springs from the minds of landscape architects, farmers and urban planners.
We now come to another point: the Fibonacci numbers. In other words, we are not focusing on the numbers themselves, but rather on what their discovery signifies. After all, in its development — at least as far as the Golden Ratio is concerned — nature follows precisely this pattern. The forms of ‘nature’ correspond to this pattern, to these numbers. So did nature spring from Fibonacci’s mind?
Ultimately, we can take this idea further by citing Wiener and Deleuze. Wiener compares our perception to a machine. This means that, as humans, we can be both machines and nature. This is where the problem of dichotomy arises. Perhaps we should avoid it. Instead, let’s take a bike and a book and read in nature. Then everything becomes one.
