For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers

Making the Turn: Rereading Barry Lopez

Making the Turn REREADING BARRY LOPEZ We are back (yes, back) at Wolf Lake-have been for ten days, long laboring days of settling in and setting things to rights. Spring is advanced this year; there is mowing and brushing to do and the gardens to be got ready (they wait on the Deere, which for the second time refuses to run at the beginning of the season). We have already dragged away huge piles of branches, the crowns of trees cut last fall. We have stacked some of the wood, leaving the larger logs to be split and stacked later. Making wood involves so much labor I am inclined to garner every last twig, but we already have enough wood for three years. So I was not reluctant to give a truckload to the young man who had come to help-willing, in this instance, to sacrifice economy to beauty, though in a proper ecos they are not separate but correlative. I write this not so much for the record-such chores are customary-but in order to make a start here, in the little cabin in which I am now free to spend my mornings. It is salutary to divide the day between the work of the mind and the work of the body-the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, the latter, as I practice it, menial, according to Hannah Arendt-and it is necessary. The work of the body, outdoor work, is out: To do such work is a primary way of beingin -the-world, of finding oneself in the cosmos, in touch with things, physically "at home." The work of the mind, indoor work, is in, doubly interior: To do such work is too often a way of withdrawing from the world, of living with its images. I use the spatial distinctions (in/out) that accord with the dualisms of mind/body, subject/object, self/world, but these are the dualisms I wish to overcome : when out, by a participatory activity of mind, and when in, by a meditative activity that seeks in words to hew to experience. This may account for my interest in "nature writing." Not most of it, which doesn't challenge dualism so much as exploit it by giving the mind sovereign play, sometimes in sentiment and sentimental spirituality, and most often by a show of literary sensibility. Nature writers-I'm thinking of many of the contemporary writers represented in the Antaeus collection edited by Daniel Halpern and in Words from the Land: Encounters with Natural History Writing, edited by Stephen Trimble--are "fine" writers. As Trimble says, those he has selected "see themselves as writers first." They are personal essayists, often of distinction, who find some of their material in nature, and many of them, as in the Charles Addams cartoon I've posted here, sit for their own portrait when they go there. Seldom are they naturalists like Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold, who articulated a profound, lifelong engagement with nature, more often wrote to live than to make a living, and preferred advocacy to pacification. Taken together , the Antaeus collection and Words from the Land give us a canon and establish nature writing as fashionable, a genre ready-to-hand for writers' workshops . I have spent an hour this morning looking for a few pages I had written several years ago on this entry in John Muir's journal: "Not like taking the veil-no solemn abjuration of the world. I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." I cannot recall my exegesis now (the absence is palpable and disturbs me) but only that it provided the ground of my concern with out/in, about which I have been making notes, knowing that this insistence has proposed itself for writing. I have not lost the quotation: I know it by heart and have it here, tacked on the wall. And I probably have the exegesis (for some reason I do not think I can now 68 ~ LOPEZ engage Muir's sentences as I did then in the readiness of the occasion) and will find it in the cluttered study in Iowa City. When I do I will fill this morning's gap by appending it. The thought thought me because I was thinking about Barry Lopez, whose Crossing Open Ground...