The texture of life

Some years ago, I taught a class of writing students whose work was surprisingly jaded and featureless. Where was the texture of life, I wondered, the feel of being alive on this particular planet? Didn't it strike them as astonishing that they shared the planet with goldfinches and heliarc welders and dung beetles and blood brothers and shiitake mushrooms? Where was their fascination with the world pressing indelibly on what they wrote? Most of the students weren't even twenty-five; how could life already have bored them?
[...]
I wondered if I could reacquaint them with a cunning we inherited from our ancestors: we can seize a phenomenon with mental pincers and stop the world in its spin, if only briefly. Look patiently, affectionately, at anything, gather six or eight perceptions, and it will never look the same again. Because Frederico Garcia Lorca wrote "A thousand glass tambourines / were wounding the dawn," we know that he once sat and watched a crystal sunrise jingling with color as splinters of light reddened the horizon.

--Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain. Scribner, 2005, pp. 48-49. ISBN 0743246748.