rain-globe

But man cannot live in chaos. The animals can. To the animal, all is chaos, only there are a few recurring motions and aspects within the surge. And the animal is content. But man is not. Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos. Then he paints the underside of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives, and dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong.

--DH Lawrence

in out in out [ask matilda]

How do you describe people who dont think - the scientist, essentially, the person who just wants to grasp the nutshell and not to lean into the infinite abyss...?  

An expansion out from from the neat confines of a perfectly epitomised meaning is the natural movement of thought. As Conrad writes in Heart of Darkness: 'The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But [...] [to Marlow] the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine'.  [....]   It is easy to misconstrue this idea of space and place, as suggested in Hamlet's words: 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space', and W.S. Graham wrote in a letter that poetry must not 'hand us out a little nutshell truth which we have pleasure in agreeing with'.  [...]  The 'bad dreams' which counteract this happy illusion for Hamlet are his awakening into consciousness, an escape into the external; in this way, poetry is like a flurry of bad dreams; brooding in the 'nutshell' that metaphor might imply, is the bad dream of instability in extended, infinite space.  Paterson's concept of metaphor as creating 'a new unity in the language' is of a unity brought about by drawing attention to the disunity of everyday literal and metaphorical language. It is an act of understanding created out of exposing the limiting enclosure of the firmament, similar to D.H. Lawrence's concept of the mind's umbrella. [...]