Scott Slovic's Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez (1992)
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Sharon Cameron has suggested in her book Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal (1985) that "to write about nature is to write about how the mind sees nature, and sometimes about how the mind sees itself" (44).
I believe this statement holds true not only for Henry David Thoreau but also for many of Thoreau's followers in the tradition of American nature writing. Such writers as Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Barry Lopez are not merely, or even primarily, analysts of nature or appreciators of nature-rather, they are students of the human mind, literary psychologists. And their chief preoccupation, I would argue, is with the psychological phenomenon of "awareness." Thoreau writes in the second chapter of Walden ( 1854) 1971, 90) that "we must learn to awakening reawaken and keep ourselves awake." But in order to achieve heightened attentiveness to our place in the natural world—attentiveness to our very existence—we must understand something about the workings of the mind.
Nature writers are constantly probing, traumatizing, thrilling, and soothing their own minds-and by extension those of their readers- in quest not only of consciousness itself, but of an understanding of consciousness. Their descriptions of this exalted mental condition tend to be variable and elusive, their terminologies more suggestive than definitive. Thoreau himself (drawing upon classical sources and daily cycles for his imagery) favors the notion of "awakening"; Dillard and Abbey use the word "awareness" to describe this state, though for Dillard such activities as "seeing" and "stalking" are also metaphors for stimulated consciousness; Berry, at least in his major essay "The Long-Legged House" (1969), emphasizes "watchfulness" as a condition of profound alertness; and for Lopez, two complementary modes of "understanding" natural places, the "mathematical" and especially the "particularized" (or experiential) - serve as keys to mental elevation. (3)
Both nature and writing (the former being an external presence, the latter a process of verbalizing personal experience) demand and contribute to an author's awareness of self and non-self. By confronting face-to-face the separate realm of nature, by becoming aware of its otherness, the writer implicitly becomes more deeply aware of his or her own dimensions, limitations of form and understanding, and processes of grappling with the unknown. (4)
The verbalization of observations and reactions makes one much more acutely aware than would a more passive assimilation of experience. As Annie Dillard notes, "Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it" (Pilgrim, 30). 4
even when we feel certain we know our natural environment, we probably do not -we may not even have really looked at it. (8)
This necessary watchfulness is enhanced by the process of writing.
By writing a sort of journal, keeping account of what you saw, slowly and slowly, your writing will become much more detailed and concrete, the pace of the narrative slowing to allow the presentation of specific natural observations, examples of how "the details rise up out of the whole and become visible" to you, a patient observer (161). 13
Difference between writing about a place from afar and a place you live in:
Berry makes an important distinction. between writing about a place from afar, treating it merely as subject matter, and actually living on the land. He writes,
In coming home and settling on this place, I began to live in my subject, and to learn that living in one's subject is not at all the same as "having" a subject. To live in the place that is one's subject is to pass (13) through the surface. The simplifications of distance and mere observation are thus destroyed... One's relation to one's subject ceases to be merely emotional or esthetical, or even merely critical, and becomes problematical, practical, and responsible as well. Because it must. It is like marrying your sweetheart. (Recollected Essays, 337) 14
For Berry, awareness or watchfulness is indeed an exalted state of mind, but it is not an innocently blissful one. Paying attention can reveal horrors (eg, the problem of erosion) as well as delights.
Nevertheless, to write about a problem is not necessarily to produce a solution, but the kindling of consciousness—one's own and one's reader's—is a first step - an essential first step.
Why write?
To organize our own knowledge: what do we know? how do we know? how do we organize our knowledge?
To synchronize with others and understand that people all see the world in a different way.
“And l lament sometimes, that there are those who lack a capacity for metaphor. They don't talk to each other, and so they don't have the benefit of each other's insights. Or they get stuck in their own metaphor, if you will, as a reality and don't see that they can help each other in this inquiry that binds people like ourselves together.” (14-15) 17
In order to write, you must walk around in it first:
Lopez once said:
"The two ways I have learned to pay attention are to read and then to go to the place myself, to walk around in it, to see what the ground feels like under my feet, to listen to the sounds of the birds..." (Bonetti, 59-60). 18
John Elder's insight in Imagining the Earth (1985) that "It seems important to acknowledge that natural scenes engender and inform meditations on literature as well as the other way around" (3) 19
Example (about the weather):
“In keeping a journal of one's walks and thoughts it seems to be worth the while to record those phenomena which are most interesting to us at the time. Such is the weather. It makes material difference whether it is foul or fair, affecting surely our mood and thoughts. Then there are various degrees and kinds of foulness and fairness. It may be cloudless, or there may be sailing clouds which threaten no storm, or it may be partially overcast. On the other hand it may rain, or snow, or hail, with various degrees of intensity. It may be a transient thunder-storm, or a shower, or a flurry of snow, or it may be a prolonged storm of rain or snow. Or the sky may be overcast or rain-threatening. So with regard to temperatures. It may be warm or cold. Above 40° is warm for winter. One day, at 38 even, I walk dry and it is good sleighing; the next day it may have risen to 48, and the snow is rapidly changed to slosh. It may be calm or windy. The finest winter day is a cold but clear and glittering one. There is a remarkable life in the air then, and birds and other creatures appear to feel it, to be excited and invigorated by it. Also warm and melting days in winter are inspiring, though less characteristic.” (Thoreau 13:106-7) 26
Example 2 (the beauty of decaying things in autumn):
“How much beauty in decay! I pick up a white oak leaf, dry and stiff, but yet mingled red and green, October-like, whose pulpy part some insect has eaten beneath, exposing the delicate network of its veins. It is very beautiful held up to the light, - such work as only an insect eye could perform. Yet, perchance, to the vegetable kingdom such a revelation of ribs is as repulsive as the skeleton in the animal kingdom. In each case it is some little gourmand, working for another end, that reveals the wonders of nature. There are countless oak leaves in this condition now, and also with a submarginal line of network exposed.” (Thoreau 7:495-96) 28
Writing to cultivate thing-power or agency:
Thoreau writes:
"Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective. The sum of what the writer of whatever class [poet or scientist] has to report is simply some human exper-ience..." (6:237).
But why the reliance upon natural symbols and tropes for the expression of human ideas? Thoreau offers an explanation when he states:
The roots of letters are things. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings.” (Thoreau 12:389) 30
The external world can bear a profound resemblance to our own minds and passages such as this one below help to substantiate his (Thoreau’s) claims of identity with the natural world.
“The mind of man is subject to moods, as the shadows of clouds pass over the earth. Pay not too much heed to them. Let not the traveller stop for them. They consist with the fairest weather. By the mood of my mind, I suddenly felt dissuaded from continuing my walk, but I observed at the same instance that the shadow of a cloud was passing over [the] spot on which I stood, though it was of small extent, which, if it had no connection with my mood, at any rate suggested how transient and little to be regarded that mood was. I kept on, and in a moment the sun shone on my walk within and without.” (2:340)
This shows that nature served as an explicit analogy for the workings of his own emotions. 31
Nature’s meaning for mankind (oneself and otherness):
“Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one's native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is preeminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant.”(Thoreau 4:163) 37
Thoreau's hope is that intense contact between the human and the nonhuman, between himself and nature, will have a beneficial effect upon his human self, both emotionally and morally. And in order for nature to have such an effect, it cannot be wholly akin to the human observer: a certain distance or difference is necessary. It is in this spirit that Thoreau notes,
“I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this.”
(4:445) 38
Another example:
On May 7, 1855, he writes:
“I observed a middling-sized red oak standing a little aslant on the side-hill over the swamp, with a pretty large hole in one side about fifteen feet from the ground, where apparently a limb on which a felled tree lodged had been cut some years before and so broke out a cavity. I thought that such a hole was too good a one not to be improved by some inhabitant of the wood. Perhaps the gray squirrels I had just seen had their nest there. Or was not the entrance big enough to admit a screech owl? So I thought I would tap on it and put my ear to the trunk and see if I could hear anything stirring within it, but I heard nothing. Then I concluded to look into it. So I shinned [sic] up, and when I reached up with one hand to the hole to pull myself up by it, the thought passed through my mind perhaps something may take hold my fingers, but nothing did. The first limb was nearly opposite to the hole, and, resting on this, I looked in, and, to my great surprise, there squatted, filling the hole, which was about six inches deep and five to six wide, a salmon-brown bird not so big as a partridge, seemingly asleep within three inches of the top and close to my face. It was a minute or two before I made it out to be an owl. It was a salmon-brown or fawn (?) above, the feathers shafted with small blackish-brown somewhat hastate (?) marks, grayish toward the ends of the wings and tail, as far as I could see. A large white circular space about or behind eye, banded in rear by a pretty broad (one third of an inch) and quite conspicuous perpendicular dark-brown stripe. Egret, say one and a quarter inches long, sharp, triangular, reddish-brown without mainly. It lay crowded in that small space, with its tail somewhat bent up and one side of its head turned up with one egret, and its large dark eye open only by a long slip about a sixteenth of an inch wide; visible breathing. After a little while I put in one hand and stroked it repeatedly, whereupon it reclined its head a little lower and closed its eye entirely. Though time.”(7:364-65)
This long paragraph shows both Thoreau's effort to observe nature faithfully—to discern its facts through careful, empirical inspection—and at the same time his use of vibrant language in order to avoid "paralysis." (42)
The process of perception itself is at the heart of this passage, which displays a subtle shifting and sometimes blending of perspective. The narrator recounts his own movement through space, an approach closer and closer to the small owl inside the "middling-sized red oak standing aslant on the side-hill"; at first, he can only speculate about the possible inhabitants of the "cavity" in the tree (and he does present a few guesses, even though he must know at the time he writes this entry what he ended up finding), but eventually he both sees and touches the actual owl inside. (43)
Writing = being alive:
The very act of keeping a journal also contributes to the writer's feeling of being alive. (54)
Thoreau's Journal becomes an extension of his life, not only because of its existence as a record of experience, but because its very form emerges from the writer's pulse.
The journal keeper observes:
“We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member. Often I feel that my head stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing. It is always essential that we love to do what we are doing, do it with a heart.” (Thoreau 2:441) 56
Write while a heart is in you.
Write to wake people up:
“I write in a deliberately outrageous or provocative manner because I like to startle people. I hope to wake up people. I have no desire to simply soothe or please. I would rather risk making people angry than putting them to sleep. And I try to write in a style that's entertaining as well as provocative. It's hard for me to stay serious for more than half a page at a time.” (Abbey 27) 100
Berry explains in "Getting Along with Nature":
“People cannot live apart from nature, that is the first principle of the conservationists. And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it. But this is true of all creatures; they depend upon nature, and they change it. What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and upon their places....
... And so it can hardly be expected that humans would not change nature. Humans, like all other creatures, must make a difference; otherwise, they cannot live. But unlike other creatures, humans must make a choice as to the kind and scale of the difference they make. If they choose to make too small a difference, they diminish their humanity. If they choose to make too great a difference, they diminish nature, and narrow their subsequent choices; ulti-mately, they diminish or destroy themselves. Nature, then, is not only our source but also our limit and measure.” (7-8) 120
Another example:
“One day in the summer of 1956, leaving home for school, I stopped on the side of the road directly above the house where I now live. From there you could see a mile or so across the Kentucky River Valley, and perhaps six miles along the length of it. The valley was a green trough full of sunlight, blue in its distances. I often stopped here in my comings and goings, just to look, for it was all familiar to me from before the time my memory began: woodlands and pastures on the hillsides; fields and croplands, wooded slew-edges and hollows in the bottoms; and through the midst of it the tree-lined river passing down from its headwaters near the Virginia line toward its mouth at Carrollton on the Ohio.
Standing there, I was looking at land where one of my great-great-great-grandfathers settled in 1803, and at the scene of some of the happiest times of my own life, where in my growing up years 1 camped, hunted, fished, boated, swam, and wandered—where, in short, I did whatever escaping I felt called upon to do. It was a place where I had happily been, and where I always wanted to be. And I remember gesturing toward the valley that day and saying to the friend who was with me: "That's all I need." (329-30) 111-112
X wilderness:
Years later he even asserted that "What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own" (11:450). For Thoreau, this "wildness" is an ideal quality of nature, a source of refreshment and awareness. And this particular sentence suggests that what leads us to discern wildness is the mere hint that something is alien to ourselves —thus the key to wildness is otherness. (37)
Abbey suggests in "On the Need for a Wilderness to Get Lost In," published in the New York Times in 1972:
“The reason we need wilderness is because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go crazy in peace. Every Boy Scout troop deserves a forest to get lost, miserable and starving in. Even the foulest murderer of the sweetest wife should get a chance for a run to the sanctuary of the hills. If only for the sport of it. For freedom and delirium.
Only then can we return to man's other life, to the other way, to the order and sanity and beauty of what will somewhere be, unless all visions are false, the human community.” (29)
Berry in "Getting Along with Nature,"
“The survival of wilderness-of places we do not change, where we allow the existence even of creatures we perceive as dangerous -is necessary. Our sanity probably requires it. Whether we go to those places or not, we need to know that they exist. And I would argue that we do not need just the great public wildernesses, but millions of private or semiprivate ones. Every farm should have one; wildernesses can occupy corners of factory grounds and city lots —places where nature is given a free hand, where no human work is done, where people go only as guests. These places function, I think, whether we intend them to or not, as sacred groves —places we respect and leave alone, not because we understand well what goes on there, but because we do not.” (17) 119
Uncanny:
In his 1919 essay on "The Uncanny," Freud reveals the intriguing etymological connection between das Unheimlich and das Heimisch, between the uncanny and that which is " 'familiar,' 'native, "belonging to the home'" (21). The uncanny, he observes, "is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression" (47). 117
Works Cited:
Abbey, Edward. "On the Need for a Wilderness to Get Lost In." New York Times. August 28, 1972.
Berry, Wendell. "A Country of Edges" and "The Making of a Marginal Farm." Recollected Essays 1965-1980. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
"Getting Along with Nature." Home Economics. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987.
Cameron, Sharon. Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau's Journal. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, volumes 1-14. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.
——. Walden. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971 [1854].
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. (1974) New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
"Walking," in The Natural History Essays, edited by Robert Sattelmeyer, Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1980.