the vine. (The spirit is typified by a sign on a golf course: “Members will refrain from picking up lost balls until they have stopped rolling.”) When we hurtle along in tight traffic four lanes wide, and do so daily, the universe is narrowed to the width of the road. The grand world of sky and land and sea is compressed between the ditches. Devouring “fast food” on the run, we seldom enjoy it. A wise man of India said, “You have the clock, and we have time.”
Literature of the twentieth century gave brilliant commentary on the accelerating pace of modern life and its consequences. Ray Bradbury’s novel about life in the future, Fahrenheit 451, points to a logical development: “Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last.”
In such an atmosphere, pressure is intense for work to consume more and more of our lives. How many of us live at the corner of Work & Worry? Babbitt, the 1922 novel by Sinclair Lewis, is a portrait of a harried and conformist social climber that is not, by any means, out of date:
Men were hustling to catch trolleys, with another trolley a minute behind, and to leap from the trolleys, to gallop across the sidewalk, to hurl themselves into buildings, into hustling express elevators. Men in dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food which cooks had hustled to fry. Men in barber shops were snapping, “Jus’ shave me once over. Gotta hustle.” . . . Men who had made five thousand, year before last, and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year; and the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.
Adding to the pace is the noise. Ambrose Bierce gave us a terse dictionary definition: “Noise. n. A stench in the ear. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.”
Still further, we are preoccupied with various individual or personal issues and problems, triumphs and defeats, obstacles and enjoyments. In order to deal with all these, the mind raises a wall between oneself and things beyond. Psychologically, we engage in a perpetual evasion of the here and now, screening, managing, and toning down our sensory impressions, lest we be shocked or disarmed by them. We evade living on the surface of our skins, where we would more immediately encounter the things that are. So it is that to truly notice our surroundings is rare. John Ruskin, the English writer of the nineteenth century, affirmed, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what he saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, and thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.”
Impressionist art seeks to portray this more immediate world given to us by the senses before the mind breaks it up and reorganizes it according to its preconceptions. Lisel Mueller, in her poem “Monet Refuses the Operation,” imagines the artist responding to his optometrist, who wants to “correct” his vision to be in line merely with the flat surface of things shown by a camera:
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and that what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you, it has taken me all my life
to attain the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I call the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dreams of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other.
Thus, distracted by the pace, clutter, and din of a congested society, as well as by our own individual preoccupations, the primal world is, for us, opaque and mute. In such a culture, to relate with any sensitivity to nature does not come naturally; rather, one must put forth a conscious, deliberate effort to be aware of the wider world beyond our utilitarian purposes.
In the process, however, anyone who observes the world of nature also must struggle against the compulsion to label and categorize. It is more than easy to think that such lists and logs represent understanding. Instead, mere identities penned and collated distract us from, say, the grace of the hawk on the wing or the heron’s arrowed thrust.
Imposing our own framework on the natural world hinders seeing what is there, such as when people “see” things in the clouds or in rock formations. The bedrock, the foundation of the world, protrudes. We observe it, climb it, mine it, but, sooner or later, we must use words, and we often do so to make the unfamiliar overly familiar. A sandstone cliff becomes a face in profile or a rocky spire a “castle,” a horizon is entitled “the Sleeping Giant.” Think of the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, which were named by mountain men. (There is consensus that they had definitely been in the woods too long.)
Go on a tour through a cavern filled with limestone forms built by the slow accretion of minerals in the trickle of water. The well-intentioned guide will point to the stalagmites and stalactites with a well-rehearsed monologue on how they resemble cartoon characters. Cheap chatter fills the silence between the glistening forms, as though we should not be allowed to be uneasy when confronted by such mystery. In the words of geologist David Leveson, “The guide’s patter can only be distracting—but perhaps it is meant to be, for we have lost our sense of the religious, the numinous. Somehow we never let ourselves get beyond being uncomfortable when faced with the mysterious or powerful—we giggle nervously and try to reduce it to the mundane.” Some message other than the one prepared for us in advance may reach us, a message from the earth itself.
We can be insulated from that message also by our relative affluence. Ordinary people in the western world are wealthy beyond what most in former ages could even begin to imagine. It need not be the case, but this fact alone so often shields us from beholding nature. The old rhyme has it that “The world is so full of a number of things / I’m sure we should all be happy as kings.” The trouble with that statement is that kings have never been known for their happiness, and mere power or control over things has never guaranteed it. In 1689, King Louis XIV of France ordered for his garden at Versailles, among many other items, 83,000 narcissus and 87,000 tulips to go with his 1200 fountains. We may make, if not the same mistake, at least the same
