A Minute Meditation

Henry Beston
Northern Farm: A Chronicle of Maine
written during the late 1930s
first published in 1949


When the nineteenth century and the industrial era took over our western civilization, why was it that none saw that we should all presently become peoples without a past?  Yet this is precisely what has happened and it is only now that the results of the break have become clear.

The past is gone, together with its formal arts, its rhetoric, and its institutions, and in its place there has risen something rootless, abstract, and alien, I think, to human experience.  Nothing of this sort has ever occurred in history.   

This was written during the late 1930s and published in 1949.  Is any of the above relevant today?   To be honest, I'm not even sure I know what he means.   Perhaps it's because I'm an urbanite (if there is such a word), having grown up and spent all of my life in cities.  I did spend a number of summers while growing up on my grandparents' farm in Wisconsin, but that was only for three months of the year.  I wonder if that loss he speaks of accounts for my fascination with and love of the writings of Loren Eiseley, Joseph Wood Krutch,  John Muir (a recent discovery), Konrad Lorenz, and now Henry Beston.  All focus on the natural world and on those who share this unique planet with us.

Yet, Beston speaks of this loss: The past is gone, together with its formal arts, its rhetoric, and its institutions, and in its place there has risen something rootless, abstract, and alien, I think, to human experience.  What has this to do with our alienation from the natural world?    Unlike so many fortunate people, I find only questions and more questions and seldom answers.

Nature Writing: The Tradition in English

Robert Finch and John Elder, Editors
Nature Writing:  The Tradition in English
1100+ pages
131 authors and 157 selections

I came across this by chance while browsing the local library catalog.  It's actually the second edition.  The first edition was titled The Norton Book of Nature Writing and was published in 1990.  This is an expanded version which was published in 2002.  It's a large volume, as you can see, and unfortunately there are eight holds on the only copy the local library possesses.  My plan is to read it until I have to return it and then immediately put it on hold again, and hope I will see it again sometime this year. As there is only one copy, there's a good chance it will go "missing."

The range of authors is extensive, beginning with the Englishman Gilbert White (1729--1793) and ending with Janisse Ray  (b. 1962) of the United States.  The selections by Gilbert White were first published in 1789 while the selection by Janisse Ray came out in 1999, which is about right since this volume was published in 2002.

Many of the names are familiar:  Loren Eiseley, Joseph Wood Krutch (two of my favorite all-time writers), John James Audubon, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, N. Scott Momaday,  and Edward Abbey are among those I thought might be included.  However, there were others whose names I recognized, but I didn't expect them to be in here as I was familiar with them from other genres.

I wasn't aware of the prose works of the following poets:  Edward Thomas, Walt Whitman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.  I was surprised to find a number of contributors whom I know through their fictional works: W. H. Hudson, Virginia Woolf, Isak Dinesen, D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, John Fowles, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Steinbeck, as well as a number of others.  In addition, there are some whose names I have run across but have yet to read anything by them, or if I have, it is lost:  Aldo Leopard, Ernest Thompson Seton, Edwin Way Teale, Peter Matthiessen, and Barry Lopez are among those I'm looking forward to getting at least a brief exposure to their works.

For the most part though, a  majority of the names are unfamiliar, so this will a two-fold exploratory expedition.  First, I will be exploring a variety of subjects covered in the selections, and second, I will be exploring the world of nature writing, or what used to be called natural history, if I'm not mistaken.

Even though my TBR list is impossibly long right now, I expect to add a few more names.  One will be Aldo Leopold whose excerpt from A Sand County Almanac interested me.


Well, I'm now at page 416 and the book is due today,  March 16.  Eight people are waiting for this the only copy.  I will return it and go back on the waiting list and expect to see it again in five or six months, if it doesn't go "missing" before then.

Wallace Stevens: The Snow Man

             The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the juniper shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- Wallace Stevens --
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens


One must be a part of nature--"One must have a mind of winter"-- to be able to look upon the winter scene and not invest it with human feelings--"and not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind."   This is the pathetic fallacy, investing nature with human emotions, and it appears frequently in literature and in poetry and in common speech--the sullen cloudy sky, the raging storm, and the cheerful little breeze.

And, any who can avoid the pathetic fallacy "beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."  In other words, this person sees only what is there and adds nothing to it.

I think this is what Emerson was saying in his essay, "Nature"  --.  .  .  nature is not always tricked  in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day.  Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.  To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire has sadness in it.  Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend.  The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

I think it is a reciprocal relationship in that we are influenced by what is about us and what we perceive is influenced by our feelings and thoughts at that moment.  Perhaps only a snow man can avoid the pathetic fallacy, "one with a mind of winter," one who is "nothing himself."   

Henry Beston: The Outermost House

I had only in the past year heard of Henry Beston and his classic work The Outermost House.  This is actually my second reading of the book, which gives a clear indication of my feelings about the book.  I am not going to try to review the book, for that is beyond my skills.  Suffice it to say that I enjoyed the book and will read it again.  It's one of those rare books.

Beston had had a cabin built on Cape Cod, not far from the Atlantic shore of the peninsula.  In September of 1924 he went to the cabin, planning on spending only a few weeks there.   Instead he found himself reluctant to leave.  His two-week stay eventually lasted a full year, in which he took copious notes about the seasonal changes occurring there to the beach, the weather, and the birds, plants, and animals that were his neighbors.  The Outermost House is the result of that unplanned year on Cape Cod.

Instead of a review, I will simply post several quotations from the work so as to give you an idea of Beston's ideas and  writing skills. 


"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.  And therein we err, and greatly err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings;  they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."


He seems to contradict the well-know assertion that "man is the measure of all things," supposedly made by the Greek philosopher Protagoras.  Moreover he also appears to question some of the more sympathetic views of the animal kingdom, especially that of St.  Francis of Assisi who fequently referred to our furred and feathered neighbors as brothers and sisters.  Beston simply states that they are "not brethren" nor are they "underlings." but a separate people with their own powers and abilities.

What do you think?   Is Beston right about our relationship with the other inhabitants who are "fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."

Or, is it legitimate to set humanity up as the measure of all things or even perhaps to see them as our brethren?


.

Joseph Wood Krutch: November 25, 1893--May 22, 1970

Joseph Wood Krutch, along with Loren Eiseley and Konrad Lorenz, had a profound effect on my way of thinking. Through them, I learned to appreciate the benefits of reading essays. Up to that time, I had focused primarily on fiction, but they taught me the value of reading directly the thoughts of others. I guess credit should also go to the old and now sadly defunct Time Reading Program, for it was through it that I first encountered Eiseley, Krutch, and Lorenz.

Moreover, they taught me that humans were not alone here and were not the sole owners of Earth. There were and are others here, many of whom also have a claim upon this planet and their own right to be able to live out their lives .

I moved out to Tucson in 1968 and found that Krutch had written several of works about the southwestern desert country. In one of them, I discovered that Krutch had left the east coast and was now living in Tucson. I grabbed a telephone book and found a listing for him. I drove by the house which was set far back off the road in one of the few undeveloped areas near the Tucson Medical Center. It was a huge plot, acres maybe, and except for a dirt road, still much as it had been before "civilization" arrived. I wondered if he owned it all and had kept it undeveloped.

I decided to write him and let him know how much I had enjoyed reading his books. Unfortunately, before I had a chance to write, I read a newspaper account of his death. I felt that I had missed an opportunity, but not exactly sure for what.

The undeveloped area surrounding his house is now built up, and to be honest, I no longer am exactly sure of its exact location any more. It now looks just like any other urbanized area on that street.

Joseph Wood Krutch's works are numerous and range from scholarly works on Samuel Richardson, Miguel de Cervantes, and Boccaccio to Proust. He also has a number of essays on a variety of subjects: Darwinism, behavioral psychology, determinism, Freudian psychology, contemporary views of humanity, any topic in fact which impinges upon what he sees as the human condition today. He has a number of works about the desert southwest and his various experiences there, some laughable, some serious, but all interesting. A good place to start would be a fine collection titled The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch, which includes a selection of essays from his other works.


Some excerpts from the above mentioned collection:

On Autumn

Krutch, prior to moving to Tucson, lived on the East Coast, and some of his finest writings about nature relate to that period. The excerpt below is from that period.

"One day the first prematurely senile leaf will quietly detach itself in a faint breeze and flutter silently to the ground. All through the summer an occasional unnoticed, unregretted leaf has fallen from time to time. But not as this one falls. There is something quietly ominous about the way in which it gives up the ghost, without a struggle, almost with an air of relief. Others will follow, faster, and faster. Soon the ground will be covered, though many of the stubborner trees are still clothed. Then one night a wind, a little harder than usual, and carrying perhaps the drops of a cold rain, will come. We shall awake in the morning to see that the show is over. The trees are naked; bare, ruined choirs, stark against the sky."

What follows is an expression of Krutch's attitude towards those who admire autumn. I must admit I'm one of those whom Krutch considers a bit perverse in my thinking.

"To me there always seems to be something perverse about those country dwellers who like the autumn best. Their hearts, I feel, are not in the right place. They must be among those who see Nature merely as a spectacle or a picture, not among those who share her own own moods. Spring is the time for exuberance, autumn for melancholy and regret. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness? Yes, of course, it is that too. But promise, not fulfillment, is what lifts the heart. Autumn is no less fulfillment than it is also the beginning of the inevitable end.

No doubt the colors of autumn are as gorgeous in their own way as any of spring. Looked at merely as color, looked with the eye of that kind of painter to whom only color and design are important, I suppose they are beautiful and nothing more. But looked at as outward and visible signs, as an expression of what is going on in the world of living things, they produce another effect.

'No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, as I have seen in one autumnal face'--so wrote John Donne in compliment to an old lady. But Donne was enamored of death. Send not to know for whom the leaf falls, it falls for thee."



Along with the above cited work, I recommend the following.


The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar for the Country--twelve essays which begin with Spring, of course.

The Desert Year--essays on the yearly cycle of living in the desert.

The Grand Canyon--essays

If You Don't Mind My Saying So--a quote from The Saturday Review-- these essays "add up to an irreverent commentary on muddied thinking in our time." It is a book "not to please mankind, but to vex it."

And to tell the truth, Krutch has vexed me at various times.

Overall Rating: sitting down and opening up one of Joseph Wood Krutch's works is an adventure. Try it some time.