For Love of the World: Essays on Nature Writers

Preface

ea, Preface These essays treat the standing problem of our relatedness to nature that Emerson, thinking of his own work in the great succession of thought, said "has exercised the wonder and study of every fine genius since the world began." Nature writers are their subject because they now have a certain exemplarity whose increasing importance we confirm by giving them increasing attention. Inevitably they put the problem of our relation to nature in the most primary and direct way. Even as they confront it, they clarify its twofold aspect: how to reenter the world, participate in it, and recover respect for it, and how to express the experience and significance of encounters of this kind without, by means of language itself, displacing the world. These essays belong to our moment in history, when, according to George Kateb in his essays "Thinking about Human Extinction," nothing is more essential than our reattachment to earthly existence, even "existence as such." This, to my mind, is spoken for best in the monosyllabic phrases of George Oppen: This in which; That it is. Kateb ponders our fate and the fate of the earth because of the imminence of nuclear destruction. But it seems to me that ecological destruction of a nonnuclear kind is equally imminent and that nature writers, whose witness is informed by many of the perspectives we need, have much to teach us. I know no better fable for our time--for the restoration we must begin-than Jean Giono's The Man Who Vll Planted Trees or recall in a lifetime of reading books of more immediate summons than Walden, A Sand County Almanac, and Silent Spring. I find that the titles that suggest themselves either before or during the writing of a book are both constitutive in their intuitive naming and heuristic, veritable working titles. I have had several in mind all along: Worlding, from Richard Pevear, to stand for works that "belong to the world" as against those that are alienating; Omen[s] of the World, the subtitle of Stephen Owen's Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics, which treats a poetics, to some extent fulfilled in the work of both contemporary poets and nature writers who give priority to "the bright countenances of physical things"; and In the Grain of Things, which appropriates a phrase of Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild. All these titles indicate a concern with (and for) the world and the requisite turning outward, the "miraculous dimension," according to George Oppen, who also noted that worlding is descendental, "To get down / Never the effort to go up." At one time, I put aside my working titles for a descriptive title, Six Nature Writers and Maybe a Seventh. This would have allowed me to stop and replace the last, the proposed meditation on Muir, with another selection of entries from my journal. I appreciate the confirmation of those who favored this formal diversity, but I am glad that I went on to Muir. In writing about him I found, at the very end, a more significant title, out of Hannah Arendt, that speaks alike for the writers I have written about and for myself. I have kept the initial installment, "Thinking with Thoreau ," as a token of my journal and because it places me here at Wolf Lake, where most of what is gathered in this book was written. It is properly introductory because many of the essential themes are considered here and situated in my life and thought. The journal, in any case, is in the meditative mode of much of the book and what follows may be said to continue the meditation it sets in motion. For everything here is a thinking with Thoreau-and with Emerson, who long ago first engaged me and with whom, in treating the manifold uses to which he put the idea of correspondence, I began to consider some of the problems, to cite the subtitle of my book on Emerson, of Man and Nature in American Experience. I recall now that my thinking with Emerson and Thoreau was prompted by what I had learned of Cartesianism, by a revulsion that measured an equally strong attraction to writers who, for love of the world, repudiated its epistemology and began the work of what Morris Berman calls "the reenchantment of the world." Thus, with so much of the end in the beginning, I am not surprised to find myself at last turning to nature writers and writing...