When in summer last year, I was mortally ill with bacterial endocarditis, what sustained me was the love and care of my family and also memories of special moments in my life. (Not to mention an excellent care from two cardiologists and a course of intravenous antibiotics!)
The English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) had a concept that he called “Spots of Time.” These are small, memorable events that occur mainly outdoors and in touch with nature. According to Wordsworth, these spots of time have lasting quality and are capable of “lifting us up when we are fallen.”There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence--depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse--our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
[…] Such moments
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood.
William Wordsworth "The Prelude XII" (1805) [Lines 208-261]
Wordsworth was a very avid walker and it is estimated that he walked 175 thousand miles in his lifetime — much of it alone. Most of his walks were in the Lake District, Cumbria.
Almost a century later, German Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) practiced his peripatetic philosophy. Having ‘retired’ from a chair of classical philology at the age of 35, he lived a life of a vagabond. He walked and thought and walked… much of it in Swiss Alps. And here is his take on the ‘spots of time’:
The hour-hand of life. Life consists of rare, isolated moments of greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea ―all speak completely to the heart but once, if they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.
Nietzsche, Human all to Human, section 586.
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