Читать книгу Lens to the Natural World - Kenneth H. Olson - Страница 13
Оглавление5 / To Be a Naturalist
On Seeing
As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near as I can to the heart of the world.
John Muir
What does it mean to be a naturalist? Consider this definition: A naturalist is one who studies nature with the intent of greater understanding; who seeks to help or enhance, not harm, the world’s natural processes, and who loves the natural world. So understood, the term can—and I would suggest, should—apply not merely to those who are professional naturalists but in a broad sense, also, to any and every human being.
The science that interests me most is paleontology, and I am drawn also to geology, ecology, and astronomy. In these endeavors, it must be said that I am an amateur. It was not always so, but it is now unusual for an individual to know more than a little about science and also about those things that were known before science came on the scene, because knowledge about our world has so largely become the province of specialists. The scientific approach has produced many results, unlocking aspects of the operations of nature that would never have opened to any other key; modern medicine is an obvious example, and there are numerous others. However, in some arenas, it may not be excessive to say that specialization has been carried to such a length that the situation resembles people down in little grooves, making progress straight ahead, perhaps going a long way in that direction, but the grooves are so deep that they cannot see out of them to all the other grooves. There is the cliché that we “know more and more about less and less.” Not only does the chemist not know what the physicist is doing but the organic chemist can barely talk to the colloid chemist and be understood, or so I’m told, unless they are talking about football and not about their main business.
The result is that we have all these bits and pieces, with few people concerned with connections or with anything like a larger picture, something called a worldview. We have become experts at taking things apart, and this down to smaller and smaller scale, but we are far less adept at putting the pieces back together to produce an integrated frame of reference for the whole. How many courses in business or technology exist for each course in the humanities? Much attention is paid to making a living but much less to making a life. The consequence of having many specialists and almost no generalists is a culture that lacks coherence, one with little in terms of shared outlooks and values and wherein millions struggle with questions of meaning and purpose. Is it possible that amateurs with a broad exposure would have anything to offer here?
The term amateur surely does often signify someone who knows only a little about a subject, who, for example, in the sciences, doesn’t know a proton from a crouton. However, that need not be the case. It can refer, simply, to one who does something else to make a living. In the England of the 1800s, there was little education in the sciences; instead, the great institutions focused upon instructing young gentlemen in the classics: language, literature, and the like. However, natural history was pursued as an avocation by the majority of the English clergy, and there was hardly a study that did not have a cabinet containing a collection of local fossils. One chronicler of the history of science, Eiseley, writes, “It was the amateur who laid the foundations of the science today. The whole philosophy of modern biology was established by such a ‘dabbler’ as Charles Darwin, who never at any time held a professional position in the field.” Of the amateur: “his was the sunrise of science, and it was a sunrise it becomes us ill to forget.”
Darwin had some formal education in biology at Cambridge, but no degree in the subject. He was an amateur naturalist. After graduation, he was in line to enter a course of preparation for the clergy when, instead, he shipped out on the Beagle, being allowed to go along as the ship’s “naturalist.” William “Strata” Smith was a self-educated surveyor who, in 1801, produced the first geological map, this of the entire country of England! At the time, he was scorned by those in powerful positions, but he is now recognized as one of the founders of modern geology. The Austrian monk and amateur botanist Gregor Mendel worked out the basics of genetic inheritance with peas in his monastery garden. Jane Goodall headed for Gombe in central Africa without a college education, and her later work with chimpanzees would capture the attention of millions. Physics and mathematics were the avocations of the young Albert Einstein, who wrote his most important papers while he worked as a mere clerk in a Swiss patent office. “Never lose a holy curiosity,” he said, and he didn’t.
Examples could be multiplied, but consider the case of Joseph Wood Krutch. He was a renowned drama critic, who, for his very serious avocation, studied and wrote a great deal about the plant life of the desert southwest. About such interest, he said:
This is an age of specialists, and I am by nature and as well by habit an amateur. This is a dangerous thing to confess, because specialists are likely to turn up their noses. “What you really mean is,” they say, ”a dilettante—a sort of dabbler of the arts and sciences. You may have a smattering of this or that, but you can’t be a real authority on anything at all”, and I am afraid they are at least partly right. But not long ago, my publisher asked me for a sentence or two to put on a book jacket which would explain what he called my “claim to fame.” And the best I could come up with was this: I think I know more about plant life than any other drama critic and more about the theater than any botanist!
Isn’t it rather grand that he could say that? In addition to highlighting the value of broad knowledge, it becomes still more meaningful if you know that he uses the word amateur in the original or root sense of “a lover.” Our English word comes from the French, which in turn comes from the Latin, amator, “to love.” That is, an amateur is one who does something, not as part of a salaried position and for the monetary reward, but because the activity itself is the reward. She or he is in love with the subject.
Jack Horner has long been a professional paleontologist and educator. He concludes his book Dinosaur Lives by referencing an earlier time: “On a more personal note, for many years I was an amateur collector. If certain aspects of my life had gone differently, I’d still be traipsing through the badlands of Montana searching for dinosaur fossils, motivated by nothing more than the desire to witness something I hadn’t seen before—to be surprised—which, come to think of it, is the same thing that motivates me today.”
An amateur in natural history, then, is not necessarily one with extremely limited knowledge; the main characteristic possessed is that of having a love for this wondrous world of nature, and love will lead to knowledge in one degree or another. Should we not grant that all of us are called to be amateurs in something, and should we not all have in common this interest in the wider world on which we depend for absolutely everything, including life itself? May we never lose that loving sensitivity to the planet we call home.
For it can be lost. A character in an H. G. Wells novel confessed, “There was a time when my little soul shone and was uplifted by the starry enigma of the sky. That has now disappeared. I go out and look at the stars now in the same way that I look at wallpaper.”
Again, this definition: A naturalist is one who studies nature for the purpose of greater understanding; who seeks to help or enhance, not harm, the world’s natural processes, and who loves the natural world. All of that hinges on a prior condition, i.e., that a naturalist has a conscious relationship with nature. In 1845, Thoreau wrote those wonderful words, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
All human beings, in common with all other living things, are enmeshed, or embedded in the natural world, are utterly dependent upon the whole, and exist only as a part of it. Most of the time, we are oblivious to that. We are like the whaler in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, who “out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him down to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales . . .”
Therefore, children have to be taught that bread is grain in another form, that milk doesn’t come from bottles, that meat doesn’t just appear in the refrigerator, and that behind the grocery store there is a complex and fertile world that brings all of these products into being. We live, most of the time, in controlled environments that make it all too easy for us to forget about the sustenance of what used to be called Mother Earth. In many parts of the world, the raw earth is now seldom underfoot. We have, in fact, become largely an asphalt animal, existing in environments that insulate us from the environment. For most of us, our waking and working hours are spent in buildings designed to shield us from all external factors. Encapsulated therein and bathed in artificial light, we are seldom conscious even of whether the world has rolled into darkness. The forces of nature are mollified by central heating and air conditioning so that we seldom experience even the weather, except as a minor inconvenience when a drizzle spoils the picnic or a snowfall moves us to shovel the sidewalk. Artificiality encompasses us to the extent that it is the real world no longer seems real.
None of us wants to go back to the cave, but any thinking person must surely grant that the comforts of modern life have had effects, not all of which are positive. We are the first people in history to live so thoughtless of the elemental forces that sustain us.
From time immemorial, the eternal rhythms of night and day have reminded people of their total dependence upon the source of heat and light. Each second, the sun burns some 637 million tons of hydrogen in the fusion reaction to create 632 million tons of helium and, in the process, floods space with radiant energy. It is the equivalent of a million ten-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding every second. It has raged thus for some 5 billion years, and it likely will do so for still another 5 billion years.
Ancient peoples, of course, had no idea of the details supplied by modern physics, but they knew that light was life. Therefore, most of them viewed the sun as a god and worshipped the golden orb in the heavens. As in the words of W.H. Auden, people of old saw all of nature as being full of meaning and message,
And heard inside each mortal thing
Its holy emanations sing.
Now, insulated and distanced from nature, we no longer hear it speaking, for music is nothing if the audience is deaf. In the Victorian novel Middlemarch, George Eliot described herself and all of us most of the time, when she wrote: “If we had a keen vision and feeling . . . it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-padded with stupidity.” In Picasso’s great painting, Guernica, the sun in the heavens has been replaced by an electric bulb, and one suspects the message is not salutary.
Part of the problem is the frenetic pace of life for most of us in the Western world. The sculptor Rodin said that slowness is beauty. We have, judging from much evidence, another outlook. Signs shout, “Why Wait? Get It Now: Pay Only a Dollar Down! Cars Washed: Two Minutes.” In our grocery stores, the old slow, three-minute oatmeal has gone farther back on the shelf, unable to compete with the itch for the instantaneous. It is hard to wait for anything to ripen on the vine. (The spirit is typified by a sign on a golf course: “Members will refrain from picking up lost balls until they have stopped rolling.”) When we hurtle along in tight traffic four lanes wide, and do so daily, the universe is narrowed to the width of the road. The grand world of sky and land and sea is compressed between the ditches. Devouring “fast food” on the run, we seldom enjoy it. A wise man of India said, “You have the clock, and we have time.”
Literature of the twentieth century gave brilliant commentary on the accelerating pace of modern life and its consequences. Ray Bradbury’s novel about life in the future, Fahrenheit 451, points to a logical development: “Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last.”
In such an atmosphere, pressure is intense for work to consume more and more of our lives. How many of us live at the corner of Work & Worry? Babbitt, the 1922 novel by Sinclair Lewis, is a portrait of a harried and conformist social climber that is not, by any means, out of date:
Men were hustling to catch trolleys, with another trolley a minute behind, and to leap from the trolleys, to gallop across the sidewalk, to hurl themselves into buildings, into hustling express elevators. Men in dairy lunches were hustling to gulp down the food which cooks had hustled to fry. Men in barber shops were snapping, “Jus’ shave me once over. Gotta hustle.” . . . Men who had made five thousand, year before last, and ten thousand last year, were urging on nerve-yelping bodies and parched brains so that they might make twenty thousand this year; and the men who had broken down immediately after making their twenty thousand dollars were hustling to catch trains, to hustle through the vacations which the hustling doctors had ordered.
Adding to the pace is the noise. Ambrose Bierce gave us a terse dictionary definition: “Noise. n. A stench in the ear. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.”
Still further, we are preoccupied with various individual or personal issues and problems, triumphs and defeats, obstacles and enjoyments. In order to deal with all these, the mind raises a wall between oneself and things beyond. Psychologically, we engage in a perpetual evasion of the here and now, screening, managing, and toning down our sensory impressions, lest we be shocked or disarmed by them. We evade living on the surface of our skins, where we would more immediately encounter the things that are. So it is that to truly notice our surroundings is rare. John Ruskin, the English writer of the nineteenth century, affirmed, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what he saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, and thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.”
Impressionist art seeks to portray this more immediate world given to us by the senses before the mind breaks it up and reorganizes it according to its preconceptions. Lisel Mueller, in her poem “Monet Refuses the Operation,” imagines the artist responding to his optometrist, who wants to “correct” his vision to be in line merely with the flat surface of things shown by a camera:
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and that what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you, it has taken me all my life
to attain the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I call the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dreams of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other.
Thus, distracted by the pace, clutter, and din of a congested society, as well as by our own individual preoccupations, the primal world is, for us, opaque and mute. In such a culture, to relate with any sensitivity to nature does not come naturally; rather, one must put forth a conscious, deliberate effort to be aware of the wider world beyond our utilitarian purposes.
In the process, however, anyone who observes the world of nature also must struggle against the compulsion to label and categorize. It is more than easy to think that such lists and logs represent understanding. Instead, mere identities penned and collated distract us from, say, the grace of the hawk on the wing or the heron’s arrowed thrust.
Imposing our own framework on the natural world hinders seeing what is there, such as when people “see” things in the clouds or in rock formations. The bedrock, the foundation of the world, protrudes. We observe it, climb it, mine it, but, sooner or later, we must use words, and we often do so to make the unfamiliar overly familiar. A sandstone cliff becomes a face in profile or a rocky spire a “castle,” a horizon is entitled “the Sleeping Giant.” Think of the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, which were named by mountain men. (There is consensus that they had definitely been in the woods too long.)
Go on a tour through a cavern filled with limestone forms built by the slow accretion of minerals in the trickle of water. The well-intentioned guide will point to the stalagmites and stalactites with a well-rehearsed monologue on how they resemble cartoon characters. Cheap chatter fills the silence between the glistening forms, as though we should not be allowed to be uneasy when confronted by such mystery. In the words of geologist David Leveson, “The guide’s patter can only be distracting—but perhaps it is meant to be, for we have lost our sense of the religious, the numinous. Somehow we never let ourselves get beyond being uncomfortable when faced with the mysterious or powerful—we giggle nervously and try to reduce it to the mundane.” Some message other than the one prepared for us in advance may reach us, a message from the earth itself.
We can be insulated from that message also by our relative affluence. Ordinary people in the western world are wealthy beyond what most in former ages could even begin to imagine. It need not be the case, but this fact alone so often shields us from beholding nature. The old rhyme has it that “The world is so full of a number of things / I’m sure we should all be happy as kings.” The trouble with that statement is that kings have never been known for their happiness, and mere power or control over things has never guaranteed it. In 1689, King Louis XIV of France ordered for his garden at Versailles, among many other items, 83,000 narcissus and 87,000 tulips to go with his 1200 fountains. We may make, if not the same mistake, at least the same kind of mistake with other things, using material goods as a way to measure our supposed status. Not many are of the mind of Socrates, who, by tradition, while strolling in the marketplace of ancient Athens, threw up his hands and exclaimed, “O, gods, who would have dreamed there are so many things I do not want!” Yes, who really needs so many of the things we buy? In the assessment by J. W. Krutch, the desire to be envied is almost surely what King Louis had in mind: ‘“It will be evident to all,’ so he said to himself, ‘that no one else in all the world can have as many tulips as I can, and they will envy me—though God knows, the whole eighty-seven thousand of them look dull enough to me!’”
We easily become jaded by more than we need. Shakespeare, in King Henry IV, described the syndrome in relation to the public seeing too much of Richard II, but it has a wider application, does it not?
They surfeited with honey and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
In addition, in a culture of abundance, the perfectionist mentality lies close at hand. I recall a concert performed by a large city’s symphony orchestra. It was a marvelous program of several pieces of classical music of great difficulty, and it was performed almost flawlessly. I say “almost” because midway through the clarinet solo of Brahms’s First Symphony the reed in the instrument stuck, and the result was a sour note. After that, the soloist and the rest of the orchestra went on to play expertly for more than two hours. Following the concert, my wife and I went out looking for a place for dinner; almost every restaurant was filled with people who had been at the same event. It was interesting—amazing, really—that most of the overheard conversations were not about the superb renditions of the score and of how, with precision, timing and true finesse, several dozen men and women had produced for our enjoyment some of the world’s greatest music. Instead, out of the hundreds of thousands or millions of notes, that which captured people’s attention was the single one that was slightly “off.” The object of one’s focus does make a difference.
Something similar happens to many of the affluent millions who live in the suburbs and who take to the road to “experience nature,” led to do so by the advertising that presents the land as a commodity, a package providing entertainment. Many of the 3 million people who visit Yellowstone National Parking Lot each year are disillusioned. Nature, as visualized on glossy and oversaturated photos on calendars, cannot live up to expectations. Barry Lopez summed it up: “People only able to venture into the countryside on annual vacations are, increasingly, schooled in the belief that wild land will, and should, provide thrills and exceptional scenery on a timely basis. If it does not, something is wrong, either with the land itself or possibly with the company outfitting the trip.”
When you travel on a train, you can sometimes watch small children peering out the windows and saying, “Look, Mom, a cow! Look, Mom, a horse!” Parents are often tempted to apologize for that attitude, as did one by saying to the other passengers, “You know, she still thinks everything is wonderful.” Well, not everything is wonderful, but many things are.
There was a person who was tired of living in the same place for many years and decided to move. She wrote an advertisement to put her house up for sale, in the process listing its attributes. She described its convenient features, a great location, the view, and so forth. When the newspaper came out, she read the ad and decided that it described a place as good as any she could ever imagine, and she cancelled it. All it took was a fresh pair of eyes, something that surely holds in relationship to the wider world around us.
If we can simply perceive things for what they are, even the most ordinary part of the world is far from ordinary. Ronald Reagan said, quite famously, “When you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” We can give thanks that he did not speak for everyone. Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes.” Emerson, in his essay on art: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
In, with, and under the ordinary is the extraordinary. There is an entire literature of mystical experience that speaks of a deeper perception called enlightenment. Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, says that “although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always . . . a gift and a total surprise.” She described an experience thus:
I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame . . . The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
