One night, Nietzsche steps out into the darkness of a Venice nightscape. Surrounded by the sound of water echoing across the canals-- the moonlight madly shimmering off the water-- a mood overcomes him like a song:
Venice-- At the bridge of late
I stood in the brown night.
From afar came a song:
as a golden drop it welled
over the quivering surface.
Gondolas, lights, and music--
drunken it swam out into the twilight.
My soul, a stringed instrument,
sang to itself, invisibly touched,
a secret gondola song,
quivering with iridescent happiness.
--Did anyone listen to it?
Thomas O’Dwyer, writing about Lawrence Durrell at 3Quarks Daily, says:
Durrell was born and spent an early childhood in India and though never religious, he declared that he had “a Tibetan mind,” attuned to Buddhism. Using scientific metaphor, he said that our view of the universe had changed when we discovered that the ultimate tiny atomic particle was not something hard, but a wave. “Our solid world may be real, but is also illusory and infinite. The spirit of place moves over the land like the spirit of God upon the face of the waters in Genesis,” he said in an interview.
Pneuma was the ancient Greek word for breath and also a metaphor for spirit or soul. Durrell often referred to a breeze rustling the Greek landscape as its pneuma, its spirit. An aware person drawing their breath in the landscape was merging their own spirit with that of the place.
Heidegger famously wrote that, "Mood is a form of attunement between nature and spirit; between habitat and inhabitant." Pointing out that a minimally meaningful life requires sensitivity to the power of shared moods that give mattering to our world and unity and meaning to events, according to Heidegger, moods are not something inside a person but rather are something that a person can be in. That is, moods come over us; overcoming us. The German word famously reflects this, as philosophers like to remind us that die Stimmung means mood in terms of atmosphere ("ambiance"). Often likened to music or to weather, Heideggerean mood wraps itself around our bodies. It is something that we unconsciously attune ourselves too.
Indeed, it is one way we have to grasp the way the world discloses itself to us.
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I am reading François Jullien's new book, The Great Image Has No Form, Or the Nonobject Through Painting. Jullien also talks a lot about landscapes and moods. He uses the image of wind （風）:
風教 風景 風姿 風儀 風度 風神 風情 風味
And says:
The concept of atmosphere was condemned to remain weak in European thought, given that, unlike the activity of cognition, "atmosphere" could not be conceived in terms of the opposition between the objective and the subjective. It is an influence that emerges from beings and things and is valid only by virtue of the impression it produces in us: it e-manates or im-parts and hence circulates inseperably between what is neither "that" nor 'us" anymore... indeed, an atmosphere is diffuse, disseminated, dispersed, elusive....
And hence, through one's in-haling and ex-haling, one breathes in landscape, atmosphere and social context and breathes out character, heart and correct behavior. It is not unlike a Confucian scholar whose meticulous actions-- perfectly attuned to the situation-- are guided by a Confucian sensibility, or sensitive negotiating of shared mood. Like the sound of jade reverberating off the walls of the great hall, the Confucian scholar just feels it-- this thing called virtue or proper conduct is something to which he attunes himself as embodied know-how. In the same way that a violin will internally reverberate when bowed, this mood is internalized in the sense that it becomes almost impossible to really differentiate between outer environment and inner self as they are indeed inter-dependent.
Thomas O'Dwyer at 3 Quarks Daily Spirits of Elsewhere