Sunday, February 15, 2009

Endless forms most beautiful

Gregory Crewdson from Natural Wonder series

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of species by means of natural selection..." (1859)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The image here is rich as is the passage from Darwin. I can't help thinking metaphysically about this.
Especially in hard times, its difficult to embrace any sort of breaking down or decomposition.
But if we could step back just a little, we see that growth comes from the most unexpected places, thus endless forms but also transcended ones as in the Phoenix.