{"id":1063,"date":"2023-02-04T20:53:14","date_gmt":"2023-02-05T00:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/walt-whitman-on-birds-migrating-at-midnight-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-02-04T20:53:14","modified_gmt":"2023-02-05T00:53:14","slug":"walt-whitman-on-birds-migrating-at-midnight-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/walt-whitman-on-birds-migrating-at-midnight-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Walt Whitman on Birds Migrating at Midnight \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see \u2014 who and what we are \u2014 to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it \u201caesthetic consumerism\u201d<\/a> half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The\u00a0Unphotographable<\/em><\/a> \u2014 Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.<\/h2>\n

By Maria Popova<\/h3>\n
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\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

There is singular magic to seeing a mass of creatures move in unison along the vector of a common purpose, as if commanded by a single mind. In those ultimate instances of unselfing<\/a>, we are reminded that all of nature is one grand synchrony, in which we are mere particles existing in conviviality and consanguinity with every other particle.<\/p>\n

A century and a half before Richard Powers painted in words the majestic migration of sandhill cranes<\/a>, Walt Whitman<\/strong> (May 31, 1819\u2013March 26, 1892) channels one such spectacle of humbling grandeur in Specimen Days<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the exquisite collection of prose fragments that also gave us his reflections on democracy<\/a>, music<\/a>, and the wisdom of trees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Walt