Time and Tide in Acadia Quotes

“Beautiful as they are, these tidal places are often moody and strange. Sometimes you can feel the bittersweet tang of your mortality rubbing up against a beachhead of infinity”
― Christopher Camuto, Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island

“Nature is not intentionally theatrical. The drama we sometimes see in landscapes is a projection of something in us, the trace of a nagging fear that we do not belong in nature, that we are no match for the forces that brought us into being”
― Christopher Camuto, Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island

“What else is there to do here- or anywhere in nature- but to indulge the awareness of your senses, observe, the instructive otherness that lies just beyond- or is it within - the beauty of nature, and improve your understanding of the world around you and of yourself as an observing being?”
― Christopher Camuto, Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island

“Nature encourages us to think and feel in primal ways, to clear our heads and hearts of noise, to observe the found world closely, partly to see it for what it is and partly to absorb it as a threshold for imaginative understanding of the nature of nature and our place therein.”
― Christopher Camuto, Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island

“Modern cultures restrict personhood to human beings, a selfish and dangerous contraction of awareness and sympathy. Primal cultures distribute personhood throughout nature. In such societies, animals and plants, even mountains and rivers, are spoken of as being people-beings with status equal to the status of human beings. Everything in nature has sentiment and purpose.”
― Christopher Camuto , Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island

“From here, to the south and west, one island leads to another, all the way to Frenchboro and Swans Island and Isle au Haut, as this landscape toys with the idea of islands until the sea says enough and there is only water”
― Christopher Camuto, Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island