'No method nor discipline...'

But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published, but little printed. [...] No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?

-                                                        —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Comments

[Luca Baldassarre]

Thank you for this quote...this morning I felt with a feeling of photography's inadequacy towards the issues of the earth, now I am re-establishing my faith in photography as a grand art medium.

[Nick]

Ah yes, but the seeing comes with an associated problem; the interpretation of what's seen - and that's where the problems start.

[Julie Heyward]

"When the thunder rolls, April and I sit on the screen porch and smell the ozone, watch gusting winds reveal the underside of leaves, watch lightning freeze innumerable fat raindrops in their course downward."

-Bill Emory [from 'Sun Dog']

[The Worst of Perth]

Without metaphor? I'm not so sure.

[Dwight]

Emerson wrote that he couldn't experience solitude while reading or writing. He had to get out and see Nature for himself.

What would Emerson and Thoreau think of our electronic "entertainment"?

[Claire Senft]

Sunday sermon being delivered early?

[Ken Tanaka]

Many men eat but Fu Manchu.

[Simon Griffee]

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industious and enterprising citizen.

—HDT, Life Without Principle

[Ernest Theisen]

Perhaps, Simon he was retired, just out for a walk. Most of the lumber industry in Oregon is gone now. Hundreds of people out of work, mills shut down, massive unemployment, all for the sake of a small bird that few saw. A hand full of what we call "tree huggers" destroyed many lives. They lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost everything. There was very little "clear cutting" in these areas for many years, it was bad business. The clear cutting that was done was replanted 30 years ago and is getting ready for harvest in 10 or so years. But now, because the mills are shut down, what lumber is cut is sent to off to shore Japanese floating lumber mills and we get it back as 2x4s and plywood sheets. I don't know who HDT is but a lumberjack is not a man with out principle, just a man with out a job. E

[Simon Griffee]

HDT is Henry David Thoreau—I should have just spelled out the name. Life Without Principle was first published in 1863. It's not about the lumber industry. You can read it in its entirety here:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_Without_Principle