concrete rules and abstract machines

“ With its villages and bell-towers,its tree clumped into groves here and there, it has taken upon itself the regulation of the horizon. It is the rectilinear canals, whose two banks join afar off in a pointed V, that measure the distance for us; it is the animals on the vast level green, a herd, distinct at first, then bright dots spreading out endlessly; it is this sunny patch of field cabbage; it is the multicolored palette of the fields of hyacinths and tulips - it is all this that furnishes our landmark. And yet, in the center of this dial of green enamel, not for a moment does one have the sensation of immobility. It is not only because of the infinite variation of shadows and light across the advance and decline of the day set down in an immense sky where something is happening or being meditated ceaselessly. It is not only that constant breath, powerful as a tempest, damp and light as human breathing, like the warmth on our cheek of someone quite near us and about the speak, that breath happily interpreted, as far as the eye can reach, by the windmills that draw off the water and change the course of the fog. It is not it alone, with its fluctuations, that drives home to us this feeling of time, the consciousness of this metaphysical attitude, of this communication between all beings of this infinitely subtle and diverse course of things coexisting around us. We make note of this kind of calm, unanimous work, or shall I rather say, of the weighing and sort of slow computation to which the inner satisfaction of a soul at ease, relaxed, content, soon ceases to be a stranger. Thought freed of an object that forces itself brutally upon the vision, grows big with contemplation quite naturally. One is not surprised that this is the country where Spinoza conceived his geometric poem. Something takes place within us that resembles the mariner’s state of mind: less interest in the immediate circumstances than sympathy with the elements, an eye that has been trained by long distances to rapidity and precision, less the desire to prepare the event than to profit by the phenomenon. In this place, completely penetrated by the sea, where even the grass and leaf live on the hidden sap that they borrow from it, how can one believe that the human soul is withheld from participation in this profound communication, when it is to this very communion that the cheeks of those young girls owe their dazzling flower-like tones? ”