The forests were in fact commonly referred to as the locus neminis, or “place of no one”.
Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. (Henry David Thoreau, Walden – Economy, pg. 22)
What does one see vertically or laterally in a dense forest ? The mute closure of foliage. The boundless oblivion of the dormant mind. (…) a sudden illumination of nothingness. (…) to „picture the sky to themselves” in the aspect of a huge animated body: a body not seen but imagined as there beyond the treetops. (Robert Pogue Harrison “Forests – The Shadows of Civilisation”, pag. 4)
