Retracing our Steps to the Cave, Illuminating IT

Abstract

George Sand shows so beautifully in her discourse on the joy of nature that paradoxically enough nature is connatural to man, he being part of nature himself, nature being his ground in existence, his source of primordial, vital juices, the reason for his being, the rarest of all beings. The peasant or the farmer is at the heart of nature’s progress, has his hand on its pulse, and breathes to its heartbeat. His own sensitivity has to be attuned to its rhythm—one has to have a green thumb. He, Virgil’s happy farmer, does not know of this subterranean current of juices transmitting to him nature’s harmony and oneness. But he knows the beauty of the harvest is for him inseparable from the deep joy of its accomplishment and its promise for further growth. There is a peaceful deeper current of ever progressing generation of which he is a part. His is a marriage between passing concrete flesh and the elevating ever recurring cycle of advance in which he takes part. He does not know his joy, he is focused on the quality of corn, the price of cattle, the amount of milk he may carry through his pipes to the cooling tank.