Importance of perception

The importance of perception is expressed throughout history in both art and literature. The ideologies conveyed have become somewhat conventional in the sense of escapism they offer. An idea that is present in Sylvia Plath's poem 'The Soliloquy of the Solipsist'

"I,
know you appear,
vivid at my side,
denying you sprang out of my head,
claiming you feel,
love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
though it's quite clear,
all your beauty, all your wit, is a gift
my dear,
from me. "

For aphorisms to be expressed, for idyllic places of escapism to be idyllic places of escapism, for a chair to be a chair,
they must all be perceived, else they are nothing.


Some perceptions have a general rule of thumb, with exceptions that prove the trend. The majority of people from an urban environment would undoubtedly state their idyllic place of escapism as somewhere in moderate isolation.
Is it any wonder why people feel the most 'spiritual' when at the top of a mountain, or walking through a forrest or countryside? It is a theme replete in love poetry and other pieces of literature throughout history, for example Robert Frost's 'Reluctance';

"Out through the fields and woods,
and over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view,
and looked at the world and descended."

Jon Keat's 'O Solitude!'

"Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings: climb with me the steep-
Nature's observatory, whence the dell,
In flowery slopes; its river's crystal swell"

And most forms of fiction and existentialist theory, non more so than Camus' 'The Myth of Sisyphus' where the example of the mountain is literally and allegorically implied as a perpetual sense of struggle and achievement.