Bay of Descending Dragons

So beautiful

When I first saw those sheer cliffs, I thought I was looking at a river in China!

Truly beautiful. The shots revealing the way the seas are eating away the "foundations" were kind of sad, though.

SCHON

Scarabus how is one part of the process beautiful and another (in fact the exact same process) appear sad? Its nature, things are not meant to be permanent and this is a perfect example that everything eventually fades away. (except plastic).

Ah, I can see your point now, I like to think of Frost's poem, but its too often read with a depressed pretext, I think the lack of permanence is a good thing.

"Nothing gold can stay"? I like two counterstatements, one by Wallace Stevens and the other by Walter Pater. The Stevens quote is from "Sunday Morning":

6

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

*****

The Pater is from the "Conclusion" to his Studies in the Renaissance:

...Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve — les hommes sont tous condamnés mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion — that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. [238/239] Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.