Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.
Interpretation
Nature can be viewed in many ways, much like different forms of literature that convey deeper meanings.
In this quote, Johann Georg Hamann suggests that nature is rich with metaphorical content, resembling a book or a story that offers insights and lessons. By acknowledging its various interpretations, he highlights the idea that nature holds significance beyond its physical presence, inviting us to explore its philosophical dimensions and the interconnectedness of all life.
In practice
During a nature walk, one can reflect on how landscapes tell their stories.
Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.
The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.
The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.
Every phenomenon of nature was a word, - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.
Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.
Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.
Beauty is composed of many things and never stands alone. It is part of horizons, blue in the distance, great primeval silences, knowledge of all things of the earth. It embodies the hopes and dreams of those who have gone before, including the spirit world; it is so fragile it can be destroyed by a sound or thought. It may be infinitesimally small or encompass the universe itself. It comes in a swift conception wherever nature has not been disturbed.
Next time a sunrise steals your breath or a meadow of flowers leave you speechless, remain that way. Say nothing, and listen as Heaven whispers, "Do you like it? I did it just for you."
Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies! Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.
After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.
We are in grave danger of losing forever not just millions of years of evolution on earth, but the eons of change that have produced man and his natural environment.
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