Lens to the Natural World. Kenneth H. Olson
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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