Words echoing in the Third Woods

There is an hour just at evening when the plains seem to be on the verge of saying something; they never do, or perhaps they do—eternally— though we don’t understand it, or perhaps we do understand but what they say is as untranslatable as music… 

J. L. Borges, El Fin in Ficciones, translation by J.G.

It might be that Matter is our teacher (…) but he had another form of matter to lead me to, another teacher: not the powders of the Analytical Lab but the true, authentic, timeless Urstoff, the rocks and ice of the nearby mountains. He proved to me without too much difficulty that I didn’t have the proper credentials to talk about matter. What commerce, what intimacy had I had, until then, with Empedocles’ four elements? Did I know how to light a stove? Wade across a torrent? Was I familiar with a storm high up in the mountains? The sprouting of seeds? No. So he too had something vital to teach me.

Primo Levi, Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal

We may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.

James Clerk Maxwell

An impala sprinting across the savannah can be reduced to biomechanics, and Bach can be reduced to counterpoint, yet that does no decrease one iota our ability to shiver as we experience impalas leaping or Bach thundering.

Robert Sapolsky