Striving Toward the Infinite

"The sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small. Here we easily see that nothing can be given in nature, however great it is judged by us to be, which could not, if considered in another relation, be reduced to the infinitely small; and conversely there is nothing so small which does not admit of extension by our imagination to the greatness of a world if compared with still smaller standards... Nothing, therefore, which can be an object of the senses is, considered on this basis, to be called sublime. But because there is in our imagination a striving toward infinite progress and in our reason a claim for absolute totality, regarded as a real idea, therefore this very inadequateness for that idea in our faculty for estimating the magnitude of things of sense excites in us the feeling of a supersensible faculty... Consequently it is the state of mind produced by a certain representation with which the reflective judgment is occupied, and not the object, that is to be called sublime... the sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense."

- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Only Seeing My Thoughts

"What does this think about that?
Nothing thinks about anything.
Does the earth have consciousness

of its stones and plants?
If it did, it would be people. . .
Why am I worrying about this?
If I think about these things,
I’ll stop seeing trees and plants
And stop seeing the Earth
For only seeing my thoughts...
I’ll get unhappy and stay in the dark.
And so, without thinking,

I have the Earth and the Sky."

- Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935)

Skye: Not even a Thousand Pictures

"Use a picture.

It's worth a thousand words."

- Arthur Brisbane (1864 - 1936)

(This aphorism is usually ascribed to an old Chinese proverb,
although it has been traced to an instructional talk given by Brisbane
to the Syracuse Advertising Men's Club in 1911)

I have no deeper words of wisdom to impart in regard to this photo than to simply echo Brisbane's admonition. I could say that it was a photo taken at Trumpan (Skye, Scotland at some precise lat/long coordinate), on July 4, 2016 at 10:13 local time (as one might guess, the sun sets very late on Skye in the summer), looking to the north west toward the isle of Harris, and that the ambient temperature was hovering near a comfortably cool 54 deg F. I could write some words to convey a sense of the mysteriously "dynamic stillness" that the slowly dwindling light infused the "air" with. I could wax poetic, and conjure some lines to describe the forms and colors of the evanescent clouds that so transfixed my wife's and my attention with their phantasmagorical - mystical - undulations. I could even evoke the faint, but soft accompanying symphony of mooohs and baaaas of Skye's - and Trumpan's - omnipresent cows and sheep, now cloaked by darkness, to provide a (dare I say it: synesthetic) dimension to the experience of seeing a sunset from this particular spot in space and time on our planet.

But none of these incantations come close to matching the power of a simple "picture." And yet, even the picture is inept (as would be any other I could insert in its place), and woefully inadequate to express the feeling of what it was like to be actually like being there in that moment, a short walk away from our little rented cottage, a warm meal in our bellies, kids safely by our side (though more engrossed in their flashlight-lit books than the aesthetic wonders surrounding them), knowing there are two full weeks still awaiting us on our vacation, looking out into the distance, just meditating on, and enjoying, the simple beauty spread before us.

"Use a picture; it's worth a thousand words" - yes, all true - but even a thousand pictures will fall far short of conveying what it is really like to experience the preternatural riches of Skye.

Interior of the Soul

"There is one spectacle grander than the sea,

that is the sky;

there is one spectacle

grander than the sky,

that is the interior of the soul"

- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885)

Skye: Secret Eyes

"In a few moments he came into the core of himself, where he was alone, and felt strangely companioned, not by anyone or anything, but by himself. The rejected self found refuge here, not a cowed refuge, but somehow a wandering ease; as if it were indestructible, and had its own final pride, its own secret eyes.

That's the way it went...the way. No one could see the end of the way, but of the way itself, in insight, in understanding, there could be no doubt. For man could experience that, and know its relief, and know its strange extended gladness. That was the beginning... if the lure of transcendence, of timeless or immortal implication, came around, pay no great attention, but move from one step to the next, and look at this face and stay with that... and let what would happen in the place where happenings and boundaries were."

- Neil M Gunn (1891-1973)

Postscript: Although I rarely include people in my photographs (I can echo Ansel Adams' retort to the criticism that he never took pictures of people: "Well, that's not my style!"), I have a fondness for capturing my wife in Friedrich-like poses whenever we travel. In this instance, while I was bent over my tripod looking for something interesting to shoot at my feet on a beach somewhere on Skye, I noticed how my wife's small solitary figure dwarfed - yet mysteriously, somehow also perfectly balanced - the spectacularly expansive and desolate, landscape we were immersed in. Micro and macro, momentarily fused into a state of perfect boundary-less clarity.

Skye: Hidden Beauty

"Poetry lifts the veil from the

hidden beauty of the world,

and makes familiar objects be

as if they were not familiar."

- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822)

Postscript: an attribute of which - i.e., of "...lifting the veil" - one might reasonably well also ascribe to photography. It is almost an inconsequential fact that the triptych consists of, respectively, from left to right: some reeds nestled near the shallow end of a small loch near Trotternish's Old Man of Storr, a few pebbles found on the beach near Elgol, and some gentle patterns in water captured by the pier at Portree, the capital of Skye. Paraphrasing Borges' narrator (in "Pascal's Sphere"), who is quoted to have said that Pascal's image for the universe is an infinite sphere, "the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere,” one might say that beauty is infinite, "revealed everywhere, and centered nowhere." And nowhere is beauty made manifest, when visible, in quite as rich and sublime a form than on the Isle-of-Skye.

Skye: Grandeur of Quiraing

"When I consider the multitude of associated forces which are diffused through nature — when I think of that calm balancing of their energies which enables those most powerful in themselves, most destructive to the world's creatures and economy, to dwell associated together and be made subservient to the wants of creation, I rise from the contemplation more than ever impressed with the wisdom, the beneficence, and grandeur, beyond our language to express, of the Great Disposer of us all."

- Michael Faraday
(1791 - 1867)

Postscript: this shot was taken not too far from the parking area for The Quiraing on the Isle-of-Skye's Trotternish peninsula’s east coast. It is a spectacularly vibrant symphony of majestic - and labyrinthian - cliffs and grassy valleys. It is also arguably the largest landslide on earth.