Friday, December 3, 2010

The End Of Nature

...It may be true, as a mystic once contended, that most people, sometime in their lives, are moved by natural beauty to a "mood of heightened consciousness" in which "each blade of grass seems fierce with meaning," but the question is: What meaning? "All nature," contended another mystic a century ago, "is the language in which God expresses her thought." Very well, but what thought is that?

The chief lesson is that the world displays a lovely order, an order comforting in its intricacy. And the most appealing part of this harmony, perhaps, is it permanence---the sense that we are part of something with roots stretching back nearly forever, and branches reaching forward just as far. Purely human life provides only a partial fulfillment of this desire for a kind of immortality. As individuals we feel desperately alone: we may not have children, or we may not care much how they have turned out; we may not care to trace ourselves back through our parents; some of us may even be misanthropes, or feel that our lives are unimportant, brief, and hurried rushes towards a final emptiness. But the earth and all its processes---the sun growing plants, flesh feeding on these plants, flesh decaying to nourish more plants, to name just one cycle---gives us some sense of a more enduring role. The poet Robinson Jeffers. a deeply pessimistic man with regard to the human condition, once wrote, "The parts change and pass, or die, people and races, rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole.... It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of a deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation...."

The End Of Nature by Bill McKibben




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