"Tabs of Ted Kaczynski" by Alden Nagel
"Tabs of Ted Kaczynski" by Alden Nagel
An Experiment in Link-Embedding an Interview Excerpt
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alden Nagel is the founder and editor of Nut Hole Publishing, and also a writer. You can find him on Instagram: @aldenwnagel
“The more intimate you become with nature, the more you appreciate its beauty. Its beauty that consists not only in sights and sounds, but in an appreciation of the whole thing. I don’t know how to express it. What is significant is that when you live in the woods, rather than just visiting them, the beauty becomes part of your life, better than something you just look at from the outside. Part of the intimacy of nature that you will acquire is a sharpening of the senses. Not that your hearing and eyesight become more acute, but you notice things more. In city life, you tend to be turned inward. Your environment is filled with irrelevant sights and sounds, and you just get conditioned to block most of them out of your consciousness. In the woods you get so that your awareness is turned outward towards your environment. Hence, you’re much more conscious of what goes on around you. For example, you notice inconspicuous things on the ground, such as edible plants or animal tracks. If a human being has passed through and has even left just a small part of a footprint, you’ll probably notice it. You know what the sounds are that come to your ears; this is a bird call, that is the buzzing of a horse fly, this is a startled deer running off. This is the thump of a pine cone that has been cut down by a squirrel and has landed on a log. If you hear a sound that you can’t identify, it immediately catches your attention, even if it is so faint it’s barely audible. To me this alertness or openness of one’s senses is one of the greatest luxuries of living close to nature, and you can’t understand this unless you’ve experienced it yourself.”
— Excerpt from an interview with Ted Kaczynski, as done by Blackfoot Valley Dispatch in 1999.
Edited and link-embedded directly into Substack by myself.