For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers by Sherman Paul (review)

Reviews 151 Kittredge, Barry Lopez, Sherman Paul, Gary Snyder, John Tallmadge, Stephen Trimble, Jack Turner, and Terry Tempest Williams—include some of the most prolific and important contemporary American nature writers. But two particu­ larly challenging and evocative essays in the journal (reprinted in the book), T urner’s “The Abstract Wild” and Tallmadge’s “Meeting the Tree of Life,” are by writersjust beginning to receive national attention. Lyon and Peter Stine, the editor of Witnessand co-editor of this anthology, have nicely extended the scope of the journal issue by adding the work of Marcia Bonta, Scott Thybony, Brenda Peterson, Gary Nabhan, and Dan Flores. This anthology provides a splendid response to Sanders’s complaint about the barrenness and blindness of recent fiction, the essayists’ intense prose giving us new eyes with which to view the relationships between humanity and nonhuman nature, men and women, different cultures, and even various academic disciplines. (.-Sef^FT SLOVIC Southwest Texas State University tJxrr^Tjove of the World: Essays on Nature Writers. By Sherman Paul. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. 264 pages, $32.95/$14.95.) The literature of nature continues to defy our attempts to categorize it neatly. Perhaps this is why Sherman Paul’s informal, leisurely, evocative reflec­ tions on nature writers seem so admirably suited to the material. Ruminating with a wide range of writers—Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Barry Lopez, Aldo Leopold, Henry Beston, Richard Nelson and Loren Eiseley—Paul allows their work to emerge on its own terms, leaving their thought to work a course through his imagination like rivulets of rain down a window. His gentle, often incisive probing of the literature reveals not only heretofore hidden patterns of meaning within nature writing, but new ways of imagining our relationship with nature. Paul’s open-ended essays reflect a tension between two ideas, or processes, which he says are key to the evocation of nature found in these writers: correspon­ dence and adéquation (taken from Francis Ponge). The former describes the search for symbolic meaning, the process of making connections between the ever-shifting and fathomless worlds of self and nature; the latter is a literary equivalence that “respects the thing and lets it stand forth.” The spare honesty of adéquation has a special importance in nature writing, Paul suggests, because it helps us to resist the kind of excessive idealizing or symbolizing that can obscure the natural world.'At the same time, Paul recognizes that the process of “reimagining of the self’ in relation to nature—a primary motif reflected in varying degrees in all these writers—is itself a symbolic process, one that must be allowed to balance and complement the work of adéquation. Paul’s respect for adéquation shows in his careful attention to the writers’ 152 Western American Literature style and method—e.g. he notes the “perennial freshness” of Leopold’s “para­ bolic” style; he appreciates Muir’s lively participles, which “convey the sense of process” in the natural world; and he critiques the self-consciousness that plagues a generation of nature writers more often represented by literary figures than by naturalists. He also celebrates the possibilities of a natural im agination rooted in correspondence: the “descendental” motif in Loren Eiseley’s poetry; the vertical axis in John Muir’s narratives; the “unity of the outer and inner landscapes” to which Barry Lopez testifies. One of the main achievements of Paul’swork and one of its chief pleasures is that it leads us to consider further the meaning of this tension between self and natural world. He asks us to take to heart Thoreau’s haunting reminder: “The universe is not a chamber of mirrors which reflect me. When I reflect, I find that there is other than me.” W 50UGLAS BURTON-CHRISTIE Santa Clara University r ^ a n in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics ofNature. By Paul Shepard. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991. 290 pages, $24.50.) In 1967, when Lynn White suggested that our destructive attitude toward the environment might stem from Judeo-Christian teachings, a suggestion that sparked heated debates among conservationists, Paul Shepard’s Man in the...