¶ Trees (2)
Index Entry
Trees:
“I find that man has thought structurally in what I would call compressional logic, whereby he piles stone upon stone to make a building. In that kind of building you find that tension was only a secondary helper and compression was the primary logic employed. This is to say that I find many thinking spontaneously in compressional-- might makes right-- logic. I found that nature was not using that logic. In our solar system the Earth is not touching and ball-bearing around the Moon’s surface. And in the atoms the energy components are equally remote from one another. In the atom the electron is as remote from the proton in the microstructure as the Earth is from the Moon in our planetary macrostructure. In terms of relative diameters, we still have the same kind of celestial attraction that we have in the microcosm. There are no ‘solids,’ just as there are no ‘materials,’ but there are sufficient relative proximities of these masses which are enough to cohere; just as the Earth’s mass is enough to have it held to the Sun even though they are 92 million miles distant. I find that nature is here using continuous tension and discontinuous islanded compression.”
¶ Citations
- Syracuse Address, Pp. 55-56. 7 Nov '67
