The Saunterer

Thomas Gray on the sublime in wilderness

    You would think that religions would support preserving great spaces of wilderness. Wilderness (and not the cities) is where the sublime can be found, and the sublime promotes belief in God. Thomas Gray wrote this:

I own I have not, as yet, any where met with those grand and simple works of Art, that are to amaze one, and whose sight one is to be the better for: But those of Nature have astonished me beyond expression. In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation, that there was no restraining: Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 308.)

    For a short biography of Thomas Gray, click here.

The sublime in nature

    Has any experience ever suspended your powers of comparison? If so, you have experienced the sublime. Of such an experience while mountain trekking with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Clement Carlyon wrote:

When we were ascending the Brocken, and ever and anon stopping to take breath, as well as survey the magnificent scene, a long discussion took place on the sublime and beautiful. We had much of Burke, but more of Coleridge . . . Many were the fruitless attempts made to define sublimity satisfactorily, when Coleridge, at length, pronounced it to consist in a suspension of the powers of comparison. (Quoted from Clement Carlyon’s Early Years and Late Reflections, 1936, vol. I, p. 51.)

    Clear nights of January, around 9:00 p.m. in northern latitudes, are one of the best times of the year to experience the sublime, provided the sky where you live is free of light pollution. Using binoculars or a small telescope, look south and up into the Orion nebula in the Orion constellation. The suspension of your powers of comparison will awaken a terrific intensity of feeling. We need a regular diet of the sublime, essential ingredient to being human.

    Please consider joining the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) because everyone must have the chance to go out in backyards and city parks and slew binoculars or telescope across the night sky in search of the sublime.

    For a short biographical sketch of Clement Carlyon, click here.
    To learn about the International Dark-Sky Association, click here.

Why we need John Muir naturalists

    As to why, the Saunterer would like to quote himself (from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 151):

A naturalist is someone who, in sensing parts of nature with a mind trained in biology and ecology, and a heart trained in beauty, senses beyond the parts to a transcendental kingdom, the spirit of nature. A John Muir naturalist, beside being a naturalist, has John Muir’s fight to see that wild nature is abundantly and perpetually preserved, sustenance for spiritual well-being, where nothing ever goes tiring or disappointing or betrays itself by a false note.

It is pointless to talk of protecting nature without specifying a purpose. One purpose will require one type and extent of protection; another, another. Of the two reasons for preserving nature for our physical well-being - as, clean air and water, and medical drugs - it means nothing if nature is scarred, or if there is no solitude, a billboard on every tree, loudspeakers by the streambanks, traces of human activity everywhere. But of the reasons for preserving nature for our spiritual well-being - connecting us closely to God, benefitting our creating, and cleansing us of our troubles - it means everything.

Although most environmentalists and conservationists are for preserving nature, that is their secondary concern. Environmentalists are primarily concerned with keeping the earth safe for our health, and conservationists with knowing how much of nature may be skimmed without endangering its ability to renew itself. If environmentalists succeed, the earth will not be a dumping ground for pollutants. If conservationists succeed, we won’t run low on good topsoil, water, and plants and animals important to commerce. Yet their successes may come in ways that fail to keep the spirituality of nature alive. That duty falls to John Muir naturalists, those with John Muir’s beliefs, as extracted from his collected writings and applied to today.

Lucien Price’s advice for getting over the death of a loved one

    Lucien Price’s advice is to immerse yourself in Nature:

One great healer is Nature. At first, even the smile of Nature’s beauty looks heartless. What balm can it bear to the infinite pathos when a gracious personality vanishes, or to the ghastly waste when a sovereign mind or a supreme talent is seemingly obliterated by death? Yet the dawns flame, the sunsets blaze, the seasons pace their majestic processional, the rent tissues are silently repaired, pain ceases to be continual, becomes merely recurrent at ever wider intervals, and finally comes the moment, all unexpected, when the heart once more leaps to the splendor of a sky in full bloom with the white clouds of Summer. Healing is in Time and Nature, and the fees of those two great physicians are faith and patience. (In: Litany for all Souls, by Lucien Price, p. 78.)

    Lucien Price’s advice is equally appropriate for getting over all kinds of losses of the heart – a broken love affair, a divorce,. . . . The required step is summoning the resolve to act on the advice.

Robinson Jeffers on human happiness

    Robinson Jeffers put it in terms of a thought experiment:

Human happiness? - If a harmless drug were invented, under the influence of which all people could be intensely and harmoniously happy, only working enough to provide each other with sustenance and the drug, would that be a good goal for men? That would be maximum happiness, minimum pain. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 254.)
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    For a brief biography of Robinson Jeffers, click here.

W. N. P. Barbellion’s use of will power

    A passage from the Saunterer’s book, The Life of the Creative Spirit (p. 59):

A leading example of the extent to which will power can help accomplish matters is W. N. P. Barbellion. Barbellion was a cogged locomotive. Born under a sentence of impending death, his heart dropped beats, throwing him into faints, and his doctor doubted he would see his thirtieth birthday (he didn’t).

Scattered through Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man are his angry complaints to God about being cheated of time to create consequential works. But cheated or not, he refused to capitulate. Into his foreshortened years he ordered himself to squeeze progress that would count. On almost nothing but resolve he raced his life’s work against his body’s deadline, to accomplish in zoology and in writing what we are unaccustomed to seeing from those granted twice and longer his time.

    A sample from Barbellion’s journal:

Youth is an intoxication without wine, some one says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 169.)
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    For a brief biography of W. N. P. Barbellion (pen name of Bruce Frederick Cummings), click here.

How to write good closings for your essays

    Try for a good closing – one that surprises and refreshes readers with stimulating ideas that lead them beyond the essay. How? When you reach the point of writing the closing, make an unexpected shift from the thesis you have been writing about to a different thesis. Practically all great essays do this. And some – perhaps one in five – go further; they add spice to the closing by shifting to a more informal writing style.
    To illustrate, consider the January 11, 2006, entry in this weblog, titled “George Perkins Marsh and John Muir: their contrasting styles of writing.” It’s a miniature essay which opens with the thesis that Marsh is an information conveyer, and Muir is an emotion conveyer. Then comes the essay’s main section, a sample of Marsh’s writing conveying information about the interconnectedness of nature, followed by a sample of Muir’s writing conveying emotion about the interconnectedness of nature.
    For the closing, I shifted the thesis to another, posed as a question, “How is it possible for one person to learn to write well as an information conveyer when that suits the purpose, and as an emotion conveyer when that suits the purpose? Inherited or acquired?” To lead readers to answering this for themselves, I quoted a remark of Jacob Bronowski. What makes this a good closing is that it unexpectedly opens a door, inviting readers to think beyond the essay.
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    For advice and illustrations on good ways of closing essays, see chapter 11 of How about it, Writer?, by H. Charles Romesburg, (ISBN 1-4116-2862-4).

Eddie Rickenbacker’s advice to be respectful to one’s elders

    Eddie Rickenbacker advised:

Always be respectful to your superiors and elders as it is an acknowledgement of your capacity to appreciate the benefits acquired from experience. This was evidenced by my answer to a query recently, “What advice can you give the younger generation, based on your greatest failure?” My answer was, “Failure to evaluate and understand the advice of my elders in my youth.”(Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 246.)

    For a brief biography of Eddie Rickenbacker, click here.

George Perkins Marsh and John Muir: their contrasting styles of writing

    Marsh is an information conveyer; Muir, an emotion conveyer. Marsh writes as a scientist; Muir, as a poet and mystic.

    Here is George Perkins Marsh on the interconnectedness of all parts of nature:

No atom can be disturbed in place, or undergo any change of temperature, of electrical state, or other material condition, without affecting, by attraction or repulsion or other communication, the surrounding atoms. These, again, by the same law, transmit the influence to other atoms, and the impulse thus given extends through the whole material universe. Every human movement, every organic act, every volition, passion, or emotion, every intellectual process, is accompanied with atomic disturbance, and hence every such movement, every such act or process affects all the atoms of universal matter. (Quoted from George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature.)

    Here is John Muir on the interconnectedness of all parts of nature:

No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains - beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 341.)

    How is it possible for one person to learn to write well as an information conveyer when that suits the purpose, and as an emotion conveyer when that suits the purpose? Inherited or acquired? Hear Jacob Bronowski:

I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
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    For a brief biography of George Perkins Marsh, click here. For the same of John Muir, click here. For the same of Jacob Bronowski, click here.

J. B. S. Haldane on why there is far less of nature than it seems

    Society, wrongly believing there is an abundance of nature, destroys more and more of it, and by this more and more harms our intellectual and emotional health. J. B. S. Haldane wrote:

We are all of us cut off from nature, and not only the town dwellers. It is perhaps important to remember something that we sometimes forget: that a field is as much a human product as a street. It is only on the seashore, on the moors, and in a few forests, that we see nature anything like what it was before man interfered with it. Yet if we are intellectually and emotionally cut off from nature, we suffer a loss which is hard to define. . . . (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 302.)

    The color green easily fools us into believing that the world is full of nature. Sauntering across Nebraska on Amtrak in June, we saw nothing but green. Yet practically all of its landscape is a human product. Nebraska is a factory floor.

    According to a credible estimate, at present only about half of the world’s land is unmarked by human activity. The part of this Saunterer that responds irritably to graffiti responds angrily to the defacing of nature, such as a road through a forest, a tire track in the desert, a. . . .
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    For a brief biography of J. B. S. Haldane, click here.