The Horizon
Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
George (Lord) Byron (1824)
Horizons are
alluring,
Continues the richness of the concept of horizon and its application as a metaphor for meeting novalty.
evocative, tantalising. They beckon us; intrigued we approach the novel life beyond them. They fire our imaginations with an unknown which is just sufficiently different from the known not to be threatening. And they fascinate us with that which can never be reached. They are at once within our world and beyond it.
This synthesis
Horizons run with boundaries. Both concepts help us see the problems of approaching the new and the foreign.
at the horizon, of the concrete and
the imagined,
The imagined, that which thought can produce without the immediate intervension of our senses.
seems to reflect the physical and mental aspects of life. At the horizon the unattainable
meets
The page on Emergence concerns this strange point where the unknown becomes the known.
our familiar natural world. So the horizon stands ‘between two worlds’ it is absolutely concrete and public, we can approach it together, but equally it always anounces another place, one in our minds that remains beyond the horizon, and which we can
never reach.
The god Ganesha points us towards that which is always (not temporally) beyond human understanding.
Byron’s Don Juan, from which the quote is taken, started to appear in 1819, parts were added until his death in 1824, this left a poem of some 180 pages.
The picture (which offers lens aberrations in place of a star) was taken on the northern coast of Iceland near midnight at midsummer when sunset and sunrise are a few minutes apart. Maybe not what the poet had in mind, but hopefully offering the intermingling of known and imagined that he wished to catch. If we move far enough over that horizon we stand on Greenland, the world we imagine from here becomes the physical world.
Above hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 2nd May 2020
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