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Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau philosopher, naturalist, writer and poet

He is best known for Walden’s book, A Quest for Simple Living in the Natural Environment, and for his essay Resistance to Civil Government or Civil Disobedience, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau had retired from his hometown and community for a time to settle on the shores of Lake Walden.
This loner is first and foremost a wonderful poet, who knew how to wonderfully evoke nature and the benefits that man can derive from his fellowship with it. Likewise, he is a subversive philosopher in many ways, refuting the prejudices of his contemporaries, skeptical of the power of law and the state, and denouncing the invasion of consumption and the place occupied by the value of work that he finds urgent to reconsider.
Thoreau left Harvard University with a degree in humanities, but while studying at the university modus vivendi, he did not like this long stay, although didactic. He then remained a teacher for a very short time, as opposed to the corporal punishment he used then. And if he worked in his father’s pencil factory, he used it mainly to keep his diary, which he opened on October 22, 1837, on the advice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, his neighbor at Concord, who had already met at Harvard University. , a “transcendental” philosopher who advocates an approach of man to nature.
In 1846, already settled in the woods, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax to protest the war in Mexico and slavery, an unpaid $ 6 tax that owed him a night in prison. Sufficient residence to write, two years later, a short text Political Disobedience, which did not claim rebellion but peaceful disobedience.
He would publish Walden in 1854. The profession of self-belief, an ode to nature, this text also contains developments in an already productive society that annihilates what Thoreau considers to be a life truly worth living:

“Most people, even in our relatively free country, out of ignorance or error, are so absorbed in unnecessary worries and the hard and futile effort of their lives that they can not reap the most delicate fruits. Their clumsy, trembling fingers from the overwhelming work became incapable of doing so. In fact, the employee does not have the free time that would allow him to maintain his true daily integrity. He does not have the ability to maintain human-to-human relationships with others, his work would be depreciated in the market. “It does not have time to be anything other than a machine.”

This does not mean that he despises the technical achievements of human labor. Thoreau weaves his remarks with the delicacy of these sinners who develop their riddles in the river and notes in Massachusetts Natural History that “they are no more an invasion than a spider web in the sun.” He adds: “I stop my boat in the middle of the current and sweep the sunny water to observe the nets of its nets and I wonder how the city could make this elf.
The desire for nature and also the desire to leave society, he had already felt during a trip he made with his brother in 1840, canoeing on the rivers Concord and Merrimack. Experience that he will delve into the forest of Concord and from which he will note the daily pleasures that nature offers to man. In his diary – “My diary contains everything about me that would otherwise overflow and be lost: it picks up from the field I collect with my actions” – observes nature, melts into it, and communicates with animals.

It was in July 1845 that Thoreau decided to live on the shores of Lake Walden, in a wooden cabin:
“I wanted to leave to live near the lake and when my friends did not ask me for a better reason than to want to hear the wind whispering among the reeds.”

Jaime Semprun – Pourquoi il n’y a pas d’art contemporain.

Pourquoi il n’y a pas d’art contemporain

Pourquoi des artistes ? Aujourd’hui nécessairement anachroniques.

Le devoir, pour un artiste, d’être anachronique : quand c’est contemporain, ce n’est pas de l’art ; quand c’est de l’art, ce n’est pas contemporain. Ce qui est art (sensation distillée, etc. : cf. Adorno) ne peut être contemporain, mais seulement «d’une autre époque» – la prochaine.

L’histoire de l’art moderne comme autodestruction. Cette histoire est finie ; ce n’est même plus la phase terminale… (Cf. les situationnistes sur les répétitions.)

Les discussions esthétiques périmées qui se prolongent en s’auto-parodiant tout au au long du xx e siècle, et au-delà…

L’oeuvre d’art est par essence individuelle, dans sa création comme dans se réception. L’effacement de l’individualité et l’abolition de l’art.

Comme il n’y a de science que du général, il n’y a d’art que du particulier, évidemment. Mais cette évidence, si on la confronte à l’histoire, perd beaucoup de son caractère d’évidence…

Il n’y a pas d’art social. La teneur artistique s’évapore dans l’art socialement dirigé. La séduction de l’I.S., par exemple…

La dialectique de l’individualisation-aliénation : producteur indépendant de marchandises artistiques, valorisation de la «marque déposée», le «génie», etc.

La rencontre de l’abolition de l’art individuel par la société de masse et de refus du rôle individuel de l’artiste par les avant-gardes (« la poésie personnelle ») : rencontre déterminante, et désastreuse.

Le renversement du slogan de l’art moderne : «La poésie doit être faite par tous» : la société démocratiquement garantie, reconnue…

La lutte sur les moyens de conditionnement, des futuristes à l’I.S.

L’abolition de l’art par la société de masse. Tous artistes! La démocratie : artistes en boulangerie.

L’abolition des contraintes (formelles) à l’intérieur d’une société fondée sur la contrainte = le conformisme de l’informel.

La poésie en plaquettes, comme la sclérose en plaques!

Un romancier n’a pas besoin d’être brillant sur le terrain des idées générales : celles de Tolstoi sont misérables, celles de Balzac enfantines, celles de Proust très limitées par son ignorance et son milieu…

Il est bon d’entrer dans la vie l’insulte à la bouche…

Si l’on prêtait un instant à l’art qui est dit contemporain une intention satirique à laquelle il n’accède manifestement pas, même si certains jugent bon de singer quelques poses « subversives », on pourrait voir une tentative – catalogue complet de… Mais il manque toujours les hommes…

Au contraire de la remarque de Proust, il n’y a plus que l’idée, le truc, le concept au sens publicitaire… et ce n’est pas un cadeau ! Fusion de l’art et de la publicité.

Les « querelles » sur l’art contemporain sont sans objet. En réalité, il n’existe rien de tel. Dans un roman de science-fiction du milieu du vingtième siècle, étaient exposées dans les musées les œuvres des publicitaires et « créatifs » du passé… Nous en sommes là, à cette nuance près que les publicitaires se faisant « artistes » (créatifs), les artistes se sont faits publicitaires (d’eux-mêmes et de leur monde). Ce qui porte le nom d’art contemporain est un composé de publicité, de finance spéculative et de bureaucratie culturelle.

Peut-être dira-t-on, avec quelques bonnes raisons, que c’est une gageure, dans un tel monde (dans un tel moment de l’histoire), d’être peintre. Mais c’en est une, aussi, d’être un homme…(« Soyez des hommes ! »)

Les trémolos des pleureuses de la « haute culture »… Quelle culture, quand le travail se décompose en opérations mécaniques, sans cohérence ni sensibilité ?

* * *

Le mauvais esprit, le ferment qui fait lever les idées couchées sur le papier, sans quoi elles restent lettre morte…

The Birds in Cabourg

It is noon to afternoon, a relatively warm September.
The clouds darken the landscape, where the humidity dims more.
The rain has just stopped.
Few masked figures pass like hurried shadows behind me.
The beach is empty.
Only the seagulls remained.
Across the horizon the ocean and the sky became one.
One can see scattered lights there, which look like huge fires.
The strong smell of algae washed away by the ocean and the sounds of birds create a strange atmosphere.
The storm is approaching very – very slowly.
Its dreadful distant sound is filled with the voices and fluttering of birds.
In this desert landscape, in this time of desolation, only the world of birds remained!
In their intense concern, I detect a bad omen.

Quarry in Pellina

Τhe landscape is read through a strong contrast of white and black.

On the one hand the landscape on the surface of the skin of natural vegetation of the mountain massif, with its colors and tones and the coating of plant forms. On the other hand, the dazzling glow of white, for the giant wound of the stone basement, which has been dismembered and looted for centuries, then abandoned.

What a cynical ornament is this lamentable attempt to reforest the flesh of the rock chipped by stages, with these sparse rows of small marks, a series of crosses signifying an irreparable disaster.

We encounter today and read about this irreparable trauma in the body of nature.

Plastira Lake

What impresses in the images of Lake Plastira – when viewed from a distance, placing it in a wider landscape – is the variety of geological relief, which spreads across the lake like a complex of islands, causing the illusion of the presence of an entire continent in miniature.

As if by an error of scale, it seems that a whole world is included in the lake.

A distant vision of the Islands of Utopia.

Meteora

In Meteora we find on the one hand the exceptional geological phenomenon which produced the astonishing arrangement of the “stone needles” and on the other hand the cultural use of this arrangement of vertical rocks, in the Byzantine period, when the monasteries were built on the tops of the rocks, seeking, on the one hand, the distance from human society, at the foot of the rocks, and on the other hand the approach to heaven, towards a place where the presence of God is recognized.

Thus the imposing landscape of the arrangement of vertical rocks, where clouds often unify the landscape, leaving a few peaks above the fog, is transformed into a search image of “The City of God”.

Monemvasia

Monemvasia is a huge rock in the sea, where a tongue of land at the base of the rock connects to the mainland. On this rock, in a position almost invisible from much of the surrounding terrain, is a town on two levels, below, the people’s town, and above, the town of the lords.

Monemvasia is an important station in the medieval area of the Peloponnese during the Palaeologian reconstruction of the Byzantine civilization and then during the period of Ottoman domination.

Recall that once, after 1204, (with the conquest of Constantinople by the armies of the 4th Crusade) a special branch of French chivalry flourished in the Peloponnese, an original manifestation of French medieval civilization.

Also, from the wider area of Monemvasia and Mystras come the great families that will rule the last period of the Byzantine Renaissance, parallel to the Italian Renaissance and in constant interaction with it.

Also in Monemvasia was produced for centuries one of the most esteemed wines that circulated and was praised in all the courts of medieval Europe, the famous Malvasia.

While the lower town of Monemvasia has undergone a comprehensive and rigorous archaeological restoration, under a model of reuse, which has not been applied anywhere else in Greece, the upper town (much more important for its large mansions and its great buildings and public facilities such as aqueducts) was plundered for building materials after the end of World War II and remained in the shadows in terms of archaeological restoration and historical research, as well as in terms of research and artistic development.

Palaiopoli

The beach of Paleopolis exudes, even for the uninitiated, the mystery of the place where for the first time the phenomenon of Life came out from the sea to the land, with such dynamism and an evolutionary perspective that leads to the marvelous.

Hesiod tells us of the emergence of Aphrodite on this beach, from the sperm of Uranus which fell into the immense marine amniotic sac of the Earth.

And this absolutely dominant deity of the Minoan period in the Cycladic civilization of bronze, the Potnia of the Linear B inscriptions, cannot only be Astarte/Aphrodite. It must be the deity represented in whose cult all the frescoes are dedicated at the famous excavation at Akrotiri of Santorini.

When you reach the first accessible beach, you encounter a peaceful landscape without any particular signs. However, swimming towards the stone complex and the cave/gate that leads to the second part of the beach and exiting on the other side of the stone complex, one encounters a unique sculptural complex that has been formed by geological phenomena of great intensity for millennia.

These extraordinary and persistent geological upheavals, with a marvelous and admirable plastic effect, cannot be unrelated to the accounts of the culture of the Bronze Age and the relative cult of the dominant divinity (a serene cult where girls and women of all ages offer flowers to a Spring deity) of Astarte / Aphrodite, which marks the primordial event of the emergence of life on earth from the sea, on this same beach.

Palaiohora

In Paleochora, we first encounter the exceptional landscape that has emerged, through millennial developments, from a timeless geological phenomenon.

Large-scale seismic phenomena have created three ravines (more than 100 meters deep at their deepest points) at the meeting of which emerges a kind of “needle” of stone, a vertical rock, connected by a limited strip of land to the surrounding landscape.

On top of this rock was built, in Byzantine times, Paleochora, a hidden city, invisible from all sides, both for the traveler by the sea and for the wanderer in the nearby mountainous region.

This small fortified city (Paleochora, that is to say, the ancient capital during the period of the Byzantine presence on the island) took refuge in an important population of Byzantine families, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, first passing through the upper town of Monemvasia and finding shelter there after the fall of the latter.

The violent destruction by the Turkish pirate Barbarossa (but at the same time commander of the Turkish fleet) of Paleochora in 1537, with the decimation of most of its population, after a betrayal and the revelation of its secret position, leaves a tragic scene of desolation, which still maintains for the visitor today, the great existential intensity of a terrible present/absent event.

In the remains of a dense construction both inside the fortification wall and outside, in the alley of the steep cliff, there is a multitude of small churches (in someone still finds traces of important late Byzantine wall hangings with religious themes) which testify to the need to shelter in a small space, a large population which had hoped and worked for some years for its salvation in the face of imminent and visible maximum danger, without finally being able to escape disaster.

The whole landscape to this day underlines this agony, this hope, and its tragic denial.

Le Mont Saint Michel

Perched on a rocky islet, surrounded by huge sandy beaches exposed to a powerful periodic tidal phenomenon, between Normandy and Brittany, is the “Miracle of the West”, a Gothic Benedictine abbey dedicated to the Archangel Michael and the village that grew up in the shadow of its walls.

Built between the 11th and 16th centuries, the abbey is a significant technical and artistic achievement, the buildings have had to be adapted to the relief of this unique natural space.

The visit to the built environment of the rock, in the village, and the abbey, but also in the landscape that surrounds the rock and develops in various forms in concentric circles around it, is always an experience that reserves surprises the visitor by endlessly offering material for new approaches.