The World Is Not Our Therapist or Servant

(Image: J.M. Garge)

I find it fascinating how resolutely we ignore or deny nature when supposedly writing about nature, and instead shrink the world to our own size, and project our own face onto it. In A Summer with Tu Fu, Hayden Carruth writes:

See how the heron folds her neck

in flight. See how mysteriously she perches

on the dead willow in her heraldic silence.

“Mysteriously”? Who is mystified? Not the heron, as far as Carruth or the reader know. “Heraldic silence”? What does he think the her...