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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
States of Nature7/13/2006 12:37:36The last few days have been an interesting process of returning to the carefully-laid borders of civilization from three weeks hiking in the wilderness of the Sierras in California. Last night I slept on my first cushion in quite a while, though still a couch, and tonight I anticipate some kind of bed. Checking my email has been an enormous operation, returning to states of contact with friends and resuming ongoing projects. My two dear friends and I removed ourselves in this way to inaugurate our graduation from college and movement on into a new stage of life that still does not quite have a recognizable form and feels like it could go nearly anywhere. It is funny now to evaluate the facts of what we have done. Did it work? Have we prepared ourselves ritually and adequately? Of course the narratives around this time will form only after it is too late to matter very much, when we can freely do with the event what we please, and thanks be for that! By proximity I know the experience to be far too intricate for easy labeling and characterization: it is of course another absurd happenstance of life. But it will not last that way for long. Already I have ventured boldly into the practice of classifying the thing, writing about it, remembering it, explaining it to others, and making it meaningful in doing so, simply by coding it into language. The American tradition of self-consciously reaching out to Nature is squarely, (also) self-consciously quasi-religious. It has to do with the religious by geneology and active affiliation but also sets itself as proto-religious. When John Muir writes about the mountains, he talks a great deal about God but Church and Christ are apparently irrelevant, very likely contrary to the spirit of Nature, which is a removal and purification from these things. Emerson's free-thinking ideal is affiliated with this notion of Nature. It is alive and well and powerfully institutionalized in the United States parks systems, which is also the most affordable vacation for many people and its campsites are our only answer for travelers to Europe's budget youth hostels. Nature of this kind may serve as an exemption from Religion such as it is because it has been so thoroughly spiritualized in its own right by the transcendentalist tradition. God in Nature is unspoken, obvious to all and absolutely immanent, while God of civilization must be shouted from rooftops and discussed in cafes. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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