Harmony is Not Lack of Conflict or Difference in Appearance

 

 

“So, how does it feel to be in nature away from airports and crowded cities?”

An early morning email from an old friend from England required a second cup of coffee for a reply.

… We met decades ago as healthcare professionals. Soon, we discovered that our interests went far beyond medicine and public health. Wherever our paths crossed around Asia and Europe, we made time for discussing physics, philosophy and poetry. And we remained grateful for the Internet to keep our chats alive when we physically could not meet.

“Physics is the purest approach to understand harmony” he once wrote. “It brings often conflicting concepts under a humble tent where they achieve harmony.”

Indeed, in a funny way, I think of poetry as similar to physics – the art of finding the essence with grace and parsimony.

 

“It feels great to be in nature” I wrote back. “One never feels alone or lonely there as in airports and hotel rooms.”

“Have you read “Tinter Abbey” a poem by William Wordsworth?” he asked.

I did not know the name.

“Not surprising, he wrote it in 1798” my friend wrote back with a smiling emoji attached. “It is a classic for those of us who like the pre-romantic era of English poetry.  I will send it to you, read the second paragraph – you will see that you are not the only one who prefers nature to lonely rooms and busy cities.”

 

Here are the lines he highlighted:

 

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart

 

… 1798! And say that even then busy towns and cities made poets think about nature, perhaps while sitting in lonely rooms. Lovely!

And I replied

“You know, harmony and poetry were existential processes for Confucius. You remember the Confucius Temple we visited together in Tainan, Taiwan?”

“I remember every temple we visited together, or alone” were his parting words, this time with a “photo” of Descartes at the end.

 

.. Somehow this discussion reminded me of a photo I had taken. And of the writing on a cardboard between the seemingly different cars.

 

August 19, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023