Reading "A Still Moment" in Everyman's Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest

In the Everyman's Library anthology Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest, edited by Fiona Stafford, Eudora Welty's "A Still Moment" appears alongside an eclectic and international array of short stories in which woodlands and trees serve as both setting and symbol. Welty's story depicts the momentary meeting of three characters based on historical figures—itinerant evangelist Lorenzo Dow, the outlaw James Murrell, and naturalist John James Audubon—whose singular perspectives are momentarily united on the figure of a solitary heron before being dispersed when Audubon kills the bird. While the heron itself serves as a primary and thematically unifying symbol, reading "A Still Moment" alongside the other stories of this Everyman collection serves to draw the readerly eye toward the story's larger environment, the forest spaces of Mississippi's Natchez Trace. Such a shift in focus illuminates the vital ecological dimensions of Welty's story, underscoring the relevance of "A Still Moment" to contemporary ecocritical conversations concerning the constructed boundaries between the human world and non-human environments.

Within the context of the Everyman anthology, Welty's story may be read as a narrative of human agents and their frustrated attempts to read the Mississippi landscape into their own personal visions. As Lorenzo Dow speeds on horseback through the Natchez Trace, his eye seeks to transform the surrounding environment into a stage on which he might view the drama of "the souls that he had saved and all those he had not" (Welty, "Still Moment" 207).¹ Dow's vision entails seeing the wooded space around him as primarily symbolic. " 'Inhabitants of Time! The wilderness is your souls on earth,' " he cries to his invisible congregation; " 'Look about you, if you would view the conditions of your spirit. . . . These wild places and these trails of awesome loneliness lie nowhere, nowhere but in your heart' " (210). The Mississippi forest is the space of spiritual allegory for Dow, who moves through the landscape with a speed betokening the urgency of his spiritual hunger. The outlaw James Murrell similarly views the landscape as an antagonist in his own self-mythologizing narrative, "as if the whole wilderness, where he was born, were his impediment" (212). For both Dow and Murrell, the Natchez Trace becomes a staging ground for their own striving toward achievement, whether this achievement be the winning of souls or the enaction of violence. Of the story's three central characters, Audubon alone seems initially to perceive the forest in its irreducible singularity, noting "the high cedars . . . with their silver roots trailing down on either side like the veins of deepness in this place" (213). Audubon alone registers the particularity of the trees that constitute the forest, noting both their specific type and their vital embeddedness in the landscape that surrounds them. His focused attention, however, ultimately proves to be a facet of his will to achieve self-definition, as the "gaze that looks outward must be trained without rest, to be indomitable" (219). Even if Audubon is more able to see the forest on its own terms than are Dow or Murrell, he will still be engaged in the imposition of his own will upon the material environment around him. That his will to paint the white heron necessitates killing the bird illustrates the injury that this indomitable human vision enacts on the non-human environment.

In addressing the tensions inherent in how human beings read and interpret their surrounding environments, Welty's story participates in a conversation about representations of trees and woodlands that develops throughout the anthology. In her preface to the volume, Fiona Stafford outlines the diverse roles that trees play in the collected stories and the significance of these trees and wooded spaces to the tales' human characters. On the one hand, the collected stories include representations of trees that inhabit distinctly human spaces and serve symbolic roles in the lives of human characters, standing as "garden guardians" that "reach into the past, stirring memories and hopes by still being there" (13). In Daphne Du Maurier's "The Apple Tree," for instance, a...