A Chaos of Delight: Darwin on the Sublimity and Transcendence of Nature

“No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”

Something about time with ancient trees and shimmering waters, time under star-salted skies and by sunlit horizons, takes us as far beyond ourselves as we can go in this world and at the same time returns us to ourselves clarified, magnified, more awake to the native poetry of reality between the bookends of life and death — perhaps because time in nature resets the brain’s De...