I think I might have read to much Thoreau as a result. Granted, my imagination might have got the best of me when I reached the end of Walden, but there are some things that I pulled from Thoreau that I can marry philosophically with the new entry into our nature canon: A Sand County Almanac.
One of the major ideas that stuck with me in Walden was the very idea of every inch of nature being our home. In Thoreau's "House-Warming" he claims that it is important to keep our homes as open and devoid of many secrets. To parallel this idea, I believe that all of his acute and empirical portions of Walden is suppose to further exemplify this idea of openness. It seems as though by marrying both philosophy and empirical facts, Thoreau wants Walden to be our home as much as his.
Now, where does Leopold fit into my views of nature? I believe it fits in to my view because of the concepts that he introduces in the beginning of his book. On page 25 Leopold writes "Our lumber pile, recruited entirely from the river, is thus not only a collection of personalities, but an anthology of human strivings in upriver farms and forest". I love this quote so much because of the very idea of trees being a record of humanity in general. It's a tangible memory bank of our past ancestry in which we often forget about. Our identities are imbued within in the trees. That is what nature is (at least to me). And like Thoreau mentions, that is why it is our home.
I think if at all possible, when I go on my next nature walk, I shall look not for moments of magical revelations, but rather the history that can be learned from the very roots that it grows in.
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ReplyDeleteJthomas114 said...
ReplyDeleteI like the point you make about Thoreau's combination of factual information and philosophical musings becoming a way for him to "open" Walden to his readers, much like he opened his home to visitors. It makes the reading of those long-winded chapters on the coming and going of ice on the pond seem more like just one piece of a large, beautiful jigsaw puzzle (though some readers might prefer to label the those chapters the bordering puzzle pieces, while chapters like "Economy" "Solitude" and "Conclusion" make up the bulk of the image).
I also liked Leopold's passage about the lumber pile being an "anthology." I think that it is an example of Leopold taking the same kind of approach to making his audience aware of an openness in nature, one in which we do not merely exist objectively in nature, but instead are so much a part of it that the history of our species is engrained into nature itself. Note that this is not the only time Leopold uses this metaphor--he frequently mentions using tree rings to get a sense of the history of the land around him, and he even devotes a number of pages (which, for the life of me, I simply can't find) to chronicling each and every ring that he counts in a newly-cut tree, connecting them to significant events in human history. This juxtaposition is, for me, Leopold's most successful attempt at conveying both a Nature that merely exists and a nature that coexists with human beings.