The World's supreme indifference

[Gany]

Hillman: "The world's excess of riches tempts human ambition and also
keeps it within bounds. "Old song" from West Africa says, "Excel when
you must," take the heroic course, "but do not excel the world." The
world is always more than anything you do in it, to it, with it. No
invention can surpass the creation, no story can encompass the
planet's history. The world sets limits to the heroic urge. Not only
because the world is larger and older, but because of its supreme
indifference. We would not need psychologists to warn about inflation
and preachers to exhort modesty if we bore in mind the world's
dispassionate habits as it goes its way; the days and nights, tides
and seasons, which keep human actions in humbler proportion.
Auden's remarkable poem, commenting on Brueghel's painting of the
fall of Icarus, makes the humbling indifference very clear. The puer-
boy Icarus may perform "something amazing," flying and falling through
the sky, but the horizontal world of earth and sea and daily work
continue "calmly on".
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Thats just gorgeous.... reminded of Walt Whitman's 'SONG OF MYSELF'
which begins with his grandiose ego statements about his relation with
the world: "Absorbing all to myself.... I find no sweeter fat than
sticks to my own bones...All are written to me... One world is aware
and by far the largest to me, and that is myself"

And then he finishes the poem with "The spotted hawk swoops by and
accuses me, he complains of my gab and loitering."