Earth Day 2011

Apropos thoughts from the great American poet given the giant’s recent stirrings:

“I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes and barrens and wilds. It still dwarfs and terrifies and crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter.

“Man is an affair of cities. His gardens and orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.”

– Wallace Stevens (1904)