NATURE ISN’T, as they used to say in the 1960s, my bag. I’ve known this for some time but realized it afresh recently when, on a non-matrimonial trip to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, I found myself not unimpressed–no one could ever be that–but a bit repelled by the scene before me. Niagara Falls is one of those grand sites that crush one by their power and sublimity. After gazing for six or seven minutes at the vast, relentless gush of water cascading over the horseshoe-shaped falls, I felt both fatigue and personal diminution. Walking away, I thought, Nature 48, Humanity 3. I prefer a closer game.
I’ve never seen it, but I suspect I should much prefer the Hoover Dam, where nature has been calmed and controlled. The gardens at Versailles are my notion of how nature ought to be: contorted and twisted and made beautiful for human beings. The Duc de Saint-Simon talked of “the proud pleasures of compelling nature”; more than compelled, I like it subdued. Humanity 28, Nature 7 is a score I prefer.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, I am told, the first person to make a serious fuss about the grandeur of nature in its wilderness state. After him it became a cult, and, owing to Rousseau’s influence, the tourist industry began in earnest in Switzerland, the country of his birth. The cult has of course since spread well beyond cultish bounds. The man who brought us the Social Contract, the Noble Savage, the worship of nature for its own sake, Jean-Jacques has lots for which to apologize.
All I wish to argue is that nature can be overdone and overrated. Nor will it do to stare at it overlong, except perhaps in a great landscape painting. Socrates claimed “the trees and fields will teach me nothing”; the mountains and seas would not, I suspect, have taught him much more. Samuel Johnson felt a similar apathy toward nature. Along with supplying the conditions to make human life possible–no small point, granted–nature reminds one of one’s own less than infinitesimal role in the greater scheme of things. Some of us, long aware of this fact, do not require ceaseless reminders.
Nature is fine in its place, but for me that place is on the other side of the window. I consider it best viewed from inside a house or a car. I enjoy a beautiful sunrise or sunset, though not for long. I have never lived for an extended period facing water, yet nearly every morning I drive past Lake Michigan, observing it in its various moods and changing colors, from placid to oceanic angry, from azure to gun-metal gray. Mostly, though, I am grateful not to be in it.
Am I intensely urban or merely deeply insensitive? I was born, brought up, and have lived most of my life in Chicago, a city built on the flat prairie where nature is not the main attraction, or, really, any attraction at all. One has, rather, to scratch around a good bit to find evidence of it. A few years ago I had lunch with a writer living in San Francisco who said he could never give up his apartment because of the wonderful afternoon light it attracted. This would not go down well in Chicago, where good light tends to be fluorescent.
In Poetry magazine a few years back, I read a poem called “Men Say Brown,” by Henry M. Seiden, which contains the line: “The average woman knows / 275 colors–and men know eight.” My guess is that, botanizers aside, most men’s knowledge of trees and flowers is no greater than their knowledge of colors. If pressed, I believe I can name eight or ten kinds of tree and not many more flowers. I have probably written more than a million words for print, but I am certain you will never find “sycamore” or “dahlia” among them. Nor will you discover a character in a story of mine pausing by a rhododendron. I consider lengthy descriptions of nature in novels to be pure longueurs. The major American writer who least interests me is Thoreau.
Nature is not what we should nowadays call a fun guy (perhaps a fungi is closer to it). I am grateful for its invention of the cauliflower, beefsteak tomatoes, and the seedless tangerine, but it also brings us those delightful demonstrations of arbitrary power known as avalanches, typhoons, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and other crushing jollities; and let us not forget all the charming viruses, droughts, and famines that seem never to be in short supply.
I do not despise nature. I’m not indifferent to pollution, I’m not pleased by forest fires, I don’t want to choke off our waterways, I don’t suggest that we polish off what remains of the endangered species. All I ask is to be spared the sentimentality of nature lovers. Let’s call a nice scene a nice scene, and get back to work. What, after all, did nature, like posterity, ever do for us?
–Joseph Epstein
