Reply to comment

I mentioned in my small session Thursday that the snow scene of page 301 of Hustvedt seemed very similar to a poem I had read by Wallace Stevens called The Snow Man. I looked it up this weekend to see where that connection was coming from. This is Stevens' poem:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Compare this to Hustvedt:

"It was snowing... it struck me as a moment when the boundry between inside and outside loosens, and there is no loneliness because there is no one to be lonely."

Stevens could easily be one of the missing links between Whitman and Hustvedt. Both of these passages describe, to me, a kind of nilisism, where ultimately there's nothing, but in that nothingness there is something... where ridding the mind of the burden of one's self can acheive a greater understanding of the world that surrounds it. 

Isn't that something that Evolution may ask us to do? Evolution may take away our meaning or our own singular importance in the world in exchange for an understanding of the world itself.

Stevens seems to think we have to be primed for that-- in order to understand the nothing we have to be ready to make our 'selves' nothing too.