The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.

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About Henry Adams

Henry Adams was a 19th-century American historian and adams political family member. Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. presidents. Read more on Wikipedia →

Themes

  • Death — Contemplations on mortality, loss, and the legacy we leave
  • Nature — Appreciation for the natural world and our place within it

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