In This Life Like Weeds

"The science of mathematics applies to the clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker will dare to say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the constellations. Who can predict the course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who can measure the action and counter-action between the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the play of causes in the depths of being, the cataclysms of creation? The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is the large and the largest is small; everything balances within the laws of necessity, a terrifying vision for the mind. Between living things and objects there is a miraculous relationship; within that inexhaustible compass, from the sun to the grub, there is no room for disdain; each thing needs every other thing. Light does not carry the scents of earth into the upper air without knowing what it is doing with them; darkness confers the essence of the stars upon the sleeping flowers. Every bird that flies carries a shred of the infinite in its claws. The process of birth is the shedding of a meteorite or the peck of a hatching swallow on the shell of its egg; it is the coming of an earthworm or of Socrates, both equally important to the scheme of things. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose. A patch of mold is a galaxy of blossom; a nebula is an ant-heap of stars. There is the same affinity, if still more inconceivable, between the things of the mind and material things. Elements and principles are intermingled; they combine and marry and each increases and completes the other, so that the material and the moral world both are finally manifest. The phenomenon perpetually folds in upon itself. In the vast cosmic changes universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, borne by the mysterious flow of invisible currents, making use of everything, wasting not a single sleeper's dream, sowing an animalcule here and shattering a star there, swaying and writhing, turning light into a force and thought into an element; disseminated yet indivisible, dissolving all things except that geometrical point, the self; reducing all things to the core which is the soul, and causing all things to flower into God; all activities from the highest to the humblest- harnessing the movements of the earth and the flight of an insect- to the secret workings of an illimitable mechanism; perhaps- who can say?- governing, if only by the universality of the law, the evolution of a comet in the heavens by the circling of infusoria in a drop of water. A machine made of spirit. A huge meshing of gears of which the first motive force is the gnat and the largest wheel the zodiac."

Prose: Victor Hugo, from his novel, "Les Miserables" 1862.
Painting: Keibun Matsumura (1779-1843) "Drooping Cherry-blossoms and Pigeons"