Friday, 2 June 2017
S E A L
See how he dives
From the rocks with a zoom!
See how he darts
Through his watery room
See how he darts
Through his watery room
Past crabs and eels
And green seeweed,
Past fluffs of sandy
Minnow feed!
And green seeweed,
Past fluffs of sandy
Minnow feed!
See how he swims
With a swerve and a twist,
A flip of the flipper,
A flick of the wrist!
With a swerve and a twist,
A flip of the flipper,
A flick of the wrist!
Quicksilver-quick,
Softer than spray,
Down he plunges
And sweeps away;
Softer than spray,
Down he plunges
And sweeps away;
Before you can utter
Words like "Dill pickle"
Or "Apple butter,"
Words like "Dill pickle"
Or "Apple butter,"
Back up he swims
Past Sting Ray and Shark,
Out with a zoom,
A whoop,
Past Sting Ray and Shark,
Out with a zoom,
A whoop,
Before you can say
Whatever you wish,
He plops at your side
With a mouthful of fish!
Whatever you wish,
He plops at your side
With a mouthful of fish!
By Robert Frost
Art Julia Jeffries
Art Julia Jeffries
Beautiful Miniature Books That Are Worth Sacrificing Your Eyesight For
Good things come in (very) small packages.
BY ANIKA BURGESS
MAY 26, 2017
Popular in the early 20th century as souvenir books, these tiny books of travel photos (Maine, in this case) had tags attached so they could be dropped in the mail. LAURA HAMPTON/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
In 1896, the Salmin Brothers, a Padua-based publishing company, produced Galileo a Madama Cristina de Lorena (Galileo’s Letter to Christina). It had an embossed cover and slipcase, but it had another, exceptional feature: It was sized at just 0.7 by 0.4 inches. Within, the text is printed in “fly’s eye type,” which is so small that when the Salmin Brothers first used it, for Dante’s Divine Comedy, it reportedly damaged the eyesight of the typesetter. This time, it was used in a title about one-third the size of the previous example—the smallest book ever printed with hand-set, movable type.
Galileo’s tiny tome is just one of some 4,000 miniature books held at the University of Iowa, most of which were gifted to the institution from a single collection. The donor, Charlotte M. Smith, was an avid collector of rare books, but as volumes began to overwhelm her bookshelves, she turned to miniatures. Her first purchase was a 3.75-inch-tall edition of Clement Clarke Moore’s A Visit From St. Nicholas (more commonly known by its opening line, “‘Twas the the night before Christmas … ”).
The “fly’s eye” typeface inside Galileo a Madama Cristina de Lorena, 1896. COLLEEN THEISEN/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONSAdmittedly, this title would not now be classified as a true miniature, which must be three inches or smaller. And it seems positively gargantuan compared with the books on the tinier end of the scale. The University of Iowa holds a collection of what are known as “ultra-microminiatures” (measuring less than 0.25 inches), including a Book of Genesis that can be worn as a pendant and read only with a magnifying glass. (The world’s absolute smallest—Teeny Ted From Turnip Town—was etched using an ion beam at Simon Fraser University and requires a scanning electron microscope to read.)
If there are challenges to reading some miniature books, just consider the process for creating them. “Working with the type, creating it and cutting it, setting it, and proofing it, seems be one of the biggest challenges,” says University of Iowa special collections librarian Colleen Theisen. “Remember, you set type backwards and upside down. Now add on the challenge of trying to do that when it’s a two-point font and still ‘mind your p’s and q’s!’”
The University of Iowa’s “ultraminiature” Book of Genesis. COLLEEN THEISEN/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONSGiven these functional constraints, what is the point of books so small? For starters, says Theisen, “They’re darned cute. We humans seem to be obsessed with cute things.” From cuneiform tablets to tiny medieval texts to the intricate little booksproduced today, small manuscripts have an enduring popularity.
But miniature books also have practical uses. It’s convenient to have a pocked-sized almanac of key dates, for example, or religious texts for devotional reading. “Just like an e-reader, small books have always been better for reducing weight while traveling,” says Theisen. “Napoleon famously had a traveling library that fit in a small box.”
Up! Horsie! An Original Fairy Tale, by Clara de Chatelaine, London, 1850. COLLEEN THEISEN/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONSSmall books have also lent themselves to use as contraband. In 1832, American’s first book on contraception, The Fruit of Philosophy, or The Private Companion of Young Married People, was published in miniature for easy concealment. Despite these efforts, its author, Charles Knowlton, was prosecuted for obscenity, fined, and sentenced to hard labor.
From religious texts to fairy tales, Shakespeare to flirting guides, there’s a miniature book for every subject, ready to be concealed, collected, or carried. Atlas Obscuradelved into the University of Iowa’s Charlotte M. Smith miniature book collection, which is also documented in the library’s “Miniature Mondays” blog posts—to bring you a selection of itty-bitty reading material.
A collection of 12 books, each no bigger than an inch, about Shakespeare, published in Canada, 2000. LAURA HAMPTON/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
The Little Flirt, published in 1871, is a handy guide to deciphering flirtations with handkerchiefs, gloves, fans, and parasols. According to the book, dropping a parasol means “I love you,” while carrying it over the left shoulder means “You are too cruel.” LAURA HAMPTON/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
An almanac, published by the Company of Stationers, London, 1790. LAURA HAMPTON/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Three miniature books about Japanese children in the 1930s and 1940s. The books fit into a television-shaped slipcase so their covers fill the “screen,” by Akiko Noguchi, 2013 LAURA HAMPTON/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
From 1677, Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, in which a miniature layout sits in a larger book because the pages were never cut. COLLEEN THEISEN/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
Victoria, the Good Queen and Empress, Eleanor Bulley, London, published the year of Queen Victoria’s death, 1901. LAURA HAMPTON/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
A set of ultra-microminiature books from 1979–80. LINDSAY MOEN/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
A handset edition, bound in limp vellum, of Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Venice, 1906. LAURA HAMPTON/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
The end papers from De Consolatione Philosophiae, Libre V., by Boethius, 1668. LAURA HAMPTON/UNIVERSITY OF IOWA SPECIAL COLLECTIONShttp://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/miniature-books-iowa-antique?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6dc3975067-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_06_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-6dc3975067-65897069&ct=t(Newsletter_6_1_2017)&mc_cid=6dc3975067&mc_eid=2cd79a4b6a
The Sunken World Hiding Under the Water's Surface
27 drowned places that used to be above ground.
BY MEG NEAL, PLACES EDITOR27 PLACES
There is an entire submerged world hidden just below sea level, largely out of sight to terrestrial beings today. The Earth’s shores are lined with sunken cities, flooded crypts, drowned forests, and submerged structures that have been lost underwater over the millennia, overtaken by nature or human development.
Rising sea levels and flooding caused by earthquakes, landslides, changing tides, melting glaciers, or manmade dams have wiped entire villages off the map. And sometimes, when the water recedes, these submerged cities and landscapes reemerge from the depths, an eerie glimpse at the invisible sunken world.
1
JAIPUR, INDIA
Jal Mahal
Located in the middle of a 16th-century manmade reservoir, the “Water Palace” only appears to be one story high, but there are four more levels hidden beneath the water.
2
LUCCA, ITALY
Lago di Vagli
This Tuscan lake hides a 13th-century town that was flooded with the building of a dam, lost beneath the waters. But not forever. The village has reemerged four times, whenever the waters are drained for maintenance.
3
KAZAKHSTAN
Kaindy Lake
This idyllic mountain lake formed after an earthquake caused a major landslide, creating a natural dam that filled the valley with rainwater. Dead bleached spruce trees now jut ghost-like out of the water.
4
RYE, NEW HAMPSHIRE
Sunken Forests of Rye
In two places along New Hampshire's coast, if the tide is right, you can see the stumps of a forest that drowned when the Ice Age glaciers retreated.
5
SMEDEROVO, SERBIA
Golubac Fortress
A medieval castle that withstood years of battle is now sliding off the hills into the Danube, thanks to rising river levels from a hydroelectric dam that submerged the outer walls along the lower bank.
6
VENICE, ITALY
The Flooded Crypt of San Zaccaria
As can be expected from a centuries-old building in Venice, this beautiful church’s crypt is partially filled with a permanent level of standing water from the surrounding canals.
7
BAIA, ITALY
The Sunken City of Baia
The ancient ruins of Baia were drowned by the rising water level caused by the same volcanic vents that once drew the Roman elite to the bay city.
8
EAST SUSSEX, UNITED KINGDOM
Seven Sisters Cliffs
These stark white cliffs were spat up by the ocean in prehistoric times, and are now slowly being retaken by it. As the sea pounds the base of the cliffs each day, erosion is causing them to fall chunk-by-chunk back into the water.
9
CATARMAN, PHILIPPINES
Sunken Cemetery
A volcano eruption caused this cemetery, and the capital city surrounding it, to sink below sea level. Only a giant cross rising up out of the water marks where this place of rest once was.
10
BRIGHTON, ENGLAND
Remains of the Royal Suspension Chain Pier
Half-drowned wooden stumps and stone blocks, the remains of a Victorian amusement pier that was washed away by a storm, are slowly revealed at low tide.
11
BORTH, WALES
Forest of Borth
Bits of a 4,500-year-old forest are slowly being revealed from beneath the sands of a Welsh beach, after a massive storm removed tons of sand from the shore. The buried forest has rekindled the longstanding myth of a sunken Welsh civilization.
12
KALEÜÇAĞIZ KÖYÜ, TURKEY
Kekova Island Sunken Ruins
Hidden just under the waters around this Turkish island are the ruins of a once-great ancient city, hit by a series of violent earthquakes that sank it beneath the waves in the 2nd century.
13
PORT ROYAL, JAMAICA
Sunken Pirate City at Port Royal
Nature took her revenge on the “wickedest city in the world" when a devastating earthquake hit Jamaica in 1692.
14
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Sunken City
In 1929, a landslide on the California coast caused a neighborhood of exclusive homes to tumble into the ocean.
15
TURKEY
Basilica Cisterns of Istanbul
A subterranean marvel was discovered hidden under the streets of Istanbul: the long-forgotten palatial cisterns of the Byzantine Empire. Fish swam under the vaulted ceilings of this ancient artificial lake, nicknamed the “Sunken Palace.”
16
URIBANTE, VENEZUELA
The Drowned Church of Potosi
A Gothic church once submerged by the damming of a river is now hauntingly visible as the water recedes, revealed what had been concealed for more than two decades.
17
RAVENNA, ITALY
Flooded Crypt of San Francesco
An architectural masterpiece recognized as one of the most lovely old world churches, this basilica unfortunately sits on soft marshland in a city believed to be slowly sinking. The basement crypt has been flooded by the surrounding waters and is now a shallow, underground goldfish pond.
18
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
Sunken Gardens
A Florida plumber drained a lake to plant this garden in the fertile soil that lay 15 feet down at its bottom, creating a luxuriant botanical garden below sea level.
19
BEZIDU NOU, ROMANIA
Flooded Village of Bezidu Nou
This Romanian village may have been drowned, but it is far from forgotten The spire of the town’s iconic church pierces the surface of the reservoir.
20
SCHNALS, ITALY
Campanile di Curon
This small alpine town was demolished and flooded shortly after WWII by an artificial lake that freezes over each winter, making it possible to walk up to the bell tower that juts out from the buried village.
21
FAIRVIEW, UTAH
Thistle Ghost Town
A massive landslide, the costliest in U.S. history, dammed two creeks, flooding and destroying most of this once-flourishing Western ranching town.
22
PORTUGAL
Drowned Village of Vilarinho da Furna
During particularly dry spells in Portugal’s Minho region, the barren walls of a 2,000-year-old town flooded by a manmade dam emerge from beneath the water.
23
VILANOVA DE SAU, SPAIN
Sant Romà de Sau
The Catalonian government created a dam and reservoir that completely submerged a village that had been inhabited for a millennium. But the pointed spire of the town church can still be seen above the water, and during periods of drought, the entire church emerges on dry land.
24
WALDECK, GERMANY
The Drowned Convent and Village of Berich
As lake waters recede, a German village flooded right off the map reemerges after more than a hundred years.
25
TAMBON NONG LU, THAILAND
Wat Saam Prasob, the Sunken Temple
After the construction of a dam flooded this Thai village, the only structure that remains today is the temple, which is almost entirely submerged during the rainy season.
26
BRAZIL
Old Petrolandia Church
The haunting peak of an old church is all that remains of a drowned Brazilian city, emerging from the reservoir of the state’s largest hydroelectric dam.
27
VYSOKÝ ÚJEZD, CZECHIA
Velka Amerika
A huge limestone quarry got larger and larger, forming a massive gash in the Earth. The hole flooded with water after the mining stopped, creating a still blue lake at the bottom of the gorge.
BY MEG NEAL, PLACES EDITOR27 PLACES
There is an entire submerged world hidden just below sea level, largely out of sight to terrestrial beings today. The Earth’s shores are lined with sunken cities, flooded crypts, drowned forests, and submerged structures that have been lost underwater over the millennia, overtaken by nature or human development.
Rising sea levels and flooding caused by earthquakes, landslides, changing tides, melting glaciers, or manmade dams have wiped entire villages off the map. And sometimes, when the water recedes, these submerged cities and landscapes reemerge from the depths, an eerie glimpse at the invisible sunken world.
1
JAIPUR, INDIA
Jal Mahal
Located in the middle of a 16th-century manmade reservoir, the “Water Palace” only appears to be one story high, but there are four more levels hidden beneath the water.
2
LUCCA, ITALY
Lago di Vagli
This Tuscan lake hides a 13th-century town that was flooded with the building of a dam, lost beneath the waters. But not forever. The village has reemerged four times, whenever the waters are drained for maintenance.
3
KAZAKHSTAN
Kaindy Lake
This idyllic mountain lake formed after an earthquake caused a major landslide, creating a natural dam that filled the valley with rainwater. Dead bleached spruce trees now jut ghost-like out of the water.
4
RYE, NEW HAMPSHIRE
Sunken Forests of Rye
In two places along New Hampshire's coast, if the tide is right, you can see the stumps of a forest that drowned when the Ice Age glaciers retreated.
5
SMEDEROVO, SERBIA
Golubac Fortress
A medieval castle that withstood years of battle is now sliding off the hills into the Danube, thanks to rising river levels from a hydroelectric dam that submerged the outer walls along the lower bank.
6
VENICE, ITALY
The Flooded Crypt of San Zaccaria
As can be expected from a centuries-old building in Venice, this beautiful church’s crypt is partially filled with a permanent level of standing water from the surrounding canals.
7
BAIA, ITALY
The Sunken City of Baia
The ancient ruins of Baia were drowned by the rising water level caused by the same volcanic vents that once drew the Roman elite to the bay city.
8
EAST SUSSEX, UNITED KINGDOM
Seven Sisters Cliffs
These stark white cliffs were spat up by the ocean in prehistoric times, and are now slowly being retaken by it. As the sea pounds the base of the cliffs each day, erosion is causing them to fall chunk-by-chunk back into the water.
9
CATARMAN, PHILIPPINES
Sunken Cemetery
A volcano eruption caused this cemetery, and the capital city surrounding it, to sink below sea level. Only a giant cross rising up out of the water marks where this place of rest once was.
10
BRIGHTON, ENGLAND
Remains of the Royal Suspension Chain Pier
Half-drowned wooden stumps and stone blocks, the remains of a Victorian amusement pier that was washed away by a storm, are slowly revealed at low tide.
11
BORTH, WALES
Forest of Borth
Bits of a 4,500-year-old forest are slowly being revealed from beneath the sands of a Welsh beach, after a massive storm removed tons of sand from the shore. The buried forest has rekindled the longstanding myth of a sunken Welsh civilization.
12
KALEÜÇAĞIZ KÖYÜ, TURKEY
Kekova Island Sunken Ruins
Hidden just under the waters around this Turkish island are the ruins of a once-great ancient city, hit by a series of violent earthquakes that sank it beneath the waves in the 2nd century.
13
PORT ROYAL, JAMAICA
Sunken Pirate City at Port Royal
Nature took her revenge on the “wickedest city in the world" when a devastating earthquake hit Jamaica in 1692.
14
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
Sunken City
In 1929, a landslide on the California coast caused a neighborhood of exclusive homes to tumble into the ocean.
15
TURKEY
Basilica Cisterns of Istanbul
A subterranean marvel was discovered hidden under the streets of Istanbul: the long-forgotten palatial cisterns of the Byzantine Empire. Fish swam under the vaulted ceilings of this ancient artificial lake, nicknamed the “Sunken Palace.”
16
URIBANTE, VENEZUELA
The Drowned Church of Potosi
A Gothic church once submerged by the damming of a river is now hauntingly visible as the water recedes, revealed what had been concealed for more than two decades.
17
RAVENNA, ITALY
Flooded Crypt of San Francesco
An architectural masterpiece recognized as one of the most lovely old world churches, this basilica unfortunately sits on soft marshland in a city believed to be slowly sinking. The basement crypt has been flooded by the surrounding waters and is now a shallow, underground goldfish pond.
18
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA
Sunken Gardens
A Florida plumber drained a lake to plant this garden in the fertile soil that lay 15 feet down at its bottom, creating a luxuriant botanical garden below sea level.
19
BEZIDU NOU, ROMANIA
Flooded Village of Bezidu Nou
This Romanian village may have been drowned, but it is far from forgotten The spire of the town’s iconic church pierces the surface of the reservoir.
20
SCHNALS, ITALY
Campanile di Curon
This small alpine town was demolished and flooded shortly after WWII by an artificial lake that freezes over each winter, making it possible to walk up to the bell tower that juts out from the buried village.
21
FAIRVIEW, UTAH
Thistle Ghost Town
A massive landslide, the costliest in U.S. history, dammed two creeks, flooding and destroying most of this once-flourishing Western ranching town.
22
PORTUGAL
Drowned Village of Vilarinho da Furna
During particularly dry spells in Portugal’s Minho region, the barren walls of a 2,000-year-old town flooded by a manmade dam emerge from beneath the water.
23
VILANOVA DE SAU, SPAIN
Sant Romà de Sau
The Catalonian government created a dam and reservoir that completely submerged a village that had been inhabited for a millennium. But the pointed spire of the town church can still be seen above the water, and during periods of drought, the entire church emerges on dry land.
24
WALDECK, GERMANY
The Drowned Convent and Village of Berich
As lake waters recede, a German village flooded right off the map reemerges after more than a hundred years.
25
TAMBON NONG LU, THAILAND
Wat Saam Prasob, the Sunken Temple
After the construction of a dam flooded this Thai village, the only structure that remains today is the temple, which is almost entirely submerged during the rainy season.
26
BRAZIL
Old Petrolandia Church
The haunting peak of an old church is all that remains of a drowned Brazilian city, emerging from the reservoir of the state’s largest hydroelectric dam.
27
VYSOKÝ ÚJEZD, CZECHIA
Velka Amerika
A huge limestone quarry got larger and larger, forming a massive gash in the Earth. The hole flooded with water after the mining stopped, creating a still blue lake at the bottom of the gorge.
WHY WALKING HELPS US THINK
Photograph by Alex Majoli/MagnumIn Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”
Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”
Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.
What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.
The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.
Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”
In a series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated. Another experiment required volunteers to contemplate a metaphor, such as “a budding cocoon,” and generate a unique but equivalent metaphor, such as “an egg hatching.” Ninety-five per cent of students who went for a walk were able to do so, compared to only fifty per cent of those who never stood up. But walking actually worsened people’s performance on a different type of test, in which students had to find the one word that united a set of three, like “cheese” for “cottage, cream, and cake.” Oppezzo speculates that, by setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought, walking is counterproductive to such laser-focussed thinking: “If you’re looking for a single correct answer to a question, you probably don’t want all of these different ideas bubbling up.”
Where we walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mental resources that man-made environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded intersection—rife with pedestrians, cars, and billboards—bats our attention around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to rustling reeds.
Still, urban and pastoral walks likely offer unique advantages for the mind. A walk through a city provides more immediate stimulation—a greater variety of sensations for the mind to play with. But, if we are already at the brink of overstimulation, we can turn to nature instead. Woolf relished the creative energy of London’s streets, describing it in her diary as “being on the highest crest of the biggest wave, right in the centre & swim of things.” But she also depended on her walks through England’s South Downs to “have space to spread my mind out in.” And, in her youth, she often travelled to Cornwall for the summer, where she loved to “spend my afternoons in solitary trampling” through the countryside.
Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.
Bluebells
Bluebells ( Or Memories For Heaven )
The bluebells
Stand silently
Stand silently
Witnessing
Their green nature
Their green nature
Delicate chains
Of crisp bells
Of crisp bells
Weeping soft scents
Of an English spring
Of an English spring
Draped carelessly
Around old oaks
Around old oaks
Waves of blue
Sweeping down
Sweeping down
Beneath
The coppiced hazels
The coppiced hazels
To the valley
Of the wildwood
Of the wildwood
Egal Bohen
Art Jackie Morris
Art Jackie Morris
Tuesday, 30 May 2017
Summer
Summer
I’m coming along with a bounding pace,
To finish the work that Spring begun;
I’ve left them all with a brighter face,
The flowers in the vales through which I’ve run.
I have hung festoons from laburnum trees,
And clothed the lilac, the birch, and broom.
I’ve waken’d the sound of humming bees,
And deck’d all nature in brighter bloom.
For this is my life, my glorious reign,
And I’ll queen it well in my leafy bower;
All shall be bright in my rich domain;
I’m queen of the leaf, the bud, and the flower.
To finish the work that Spring begun;
I’ve left them all with a brighter face,
The flowers in the vales through which I’ve run.
I have hung festoons from laburnum trees,
And clothed the lilac, the birch, and broom.
I’ve waken’d the sound of humming bees,
And deck’d all nature in brighter bloom.
For this is my life, my glorious reign,
And I’ll queen it well in my leafy bower;
All shall be bright in my rich domain;
I’m queen of the leaf, the bud, and the flower.
Anon
Art Mahmoud Farshchian
Art Mahmoud Farshchian
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