"In nature there are few sharp lines"
About this Quote
Nature rarely offers hard edges. Shorelines fray into marsh, daylight slides into dusk, species blend across habitats in shifting ecotones. The world arrives as gradients and overlaps, not compartments. A. R. Ammons loved this fact. Raised close to fields and later walking the New Jersey inlets that inspired poems like Corsons Inlet, he found in the coast a living lesson: dune, grass, water, wind, bird call, all braided into a moving continuity that refuses a ruler and a protractor.
The observation is physical and philosophical at once. Physically, sharp lines tend to be human impositions: survey stakes, property fences, map borders. Even a cliff-face erodes by degrees; even a leaf turns color through a spectrum. Philosophically, the appetite for crisp boundaries is a desire for certainty and control. Ammons counters with a poetics of openness. His long, wandering sentences, his willingness to let a poem ramble, improvise, and revise itself on the move, mirror the meander of tidal creeks. He exchanges systems for attentiveness, teleology for presence. If the world is continuous, then thought should be supple enough to follow its continuities.
There is an ethical edge to this stance. Binaries harden into exclusions; gradients make room. To accept few sharp lines is to practice patience with ambiguity, to notice how identities, opinions, and ecosystems are porous. It is also a discipline of humility. The more one studies a marsh or a mind, the more any outline dissolves on close inspection.
Ammons is not denying difference; he is refusing the illusion that difference must be absolute to be real. Edges exist, but as thresholds, as zones of exchange. The richest life often gathers there, where land meets water and categories blur. He proposes a mode of seeing that does justice to that richness, and a language willing to dwell in the in-between, finding form that does not force, clarity that does not cut.
The observation is physical and philosophical at once. Physically, sharp lines tend to be human impositions: survey stakes, property fences, map borders. Even a cliff-face erodes by degrees; even a leaf turns color through a spectrum. Philosophically, the appetite for crisp boundaries is a desire for certainty and control. Ammons counters with a poetics of openness. His long, wandering sentences, his willingness to let a poem ramble, improvise, and revise itself on the move, mirror the meander of tidal creeks. He exchanges systems for attentiveness, teleology for presence. If the world is continuous, then thought should be supple enough to follow its continuities.
There is an ethical edge to this stance. Binaries harden into exclusions; gradients make room. To accept few sharp lines is to practice patience with ambiguity, to notice how identities, opinions, and ecosystems are porous. It is also a discipline of humility. The more one studies a marsh or a mind, the more any outline dissolves on close inspection.
Ammons is not denying difference; he is refusing the illusion that difference must be absolute to be real. Edges exist, but as thresholds, as zones of exchange. The richest life often gathers there, where land meets water and categories blur. He proposes a mode of seeing that does justice to that richness, and a language willing to dwell in the in-between, finding form that does not force, clarity that does not cut.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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