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Seeking Awareness In American Nature Writing
"We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and liver and of every member."
250 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1998
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August 5, 2025
"The edges of the real landscape became one with the edges of something I had dreamed, but what I had dreamed was only a pattern, some beautiful pattern of light. The continuous work of the imagination, I thought, to bring what is actual together with what is dreamed is an expression of human evolution." Barry Lopez
We use his writing as a ramp or a springboard-as a guided "preparatory meditation," to lift a term from the puritan poet Edward Taylor-toward a newly receptive state of mind. Then when we put down Arctic Dreams, or another such work, we are ready to see the world we inhabit, if not an Arctic tundra or a damp northwestern forest, then perhaps rolling ranchlands of fire ant mounds and subtle wildflowers, or an urban landscape with its teasing interplay of cement and vegetation. Slovic
Overall, an interesting view of some of my favorite authors. I think it is another misleading title, what does awareness mean to people, anyways? The technical definition is ‘knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists.’ I was thinking of it as “seeing,” that is, as a deep dive into how being in nature and looking and seeing opens up vistas in our minds that opens and exhilarates, that wakes us up from sleepwalking through life, which too many seem to be doing.
What the book seems to be about is the psychological aspects themes of these nature writers, how they describe how we think and make thoughts, how our consciousness is, essentially. The author combs through all the material written about the authors’ works and adds his consciousness analysis. I just found myself puzzled by literary cri tics. The way they receive and analyze seems unlike mine, and an interesting study in itself of how we can all read the same book or essay and absorb and interpret it differently.
When I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, living in the urban concrete jungle of Manhattan, I was put off by the massive amounts of insects in the book, but when I got further in, I was mesmerized by the way a simple walk in nature could cause that much mystical awe and I had to go find it myself. She taught me how to see. Not how to be religious, or self-conscious, or unself-conscious, but simply to see beauty, accompanied by some of the rich traditions of what religious people do or say when they encounter it. The author writes at some length about a time Dillard went up on a plane, once, and whatever he absorbed from it seemed like the least important thing about it. To me.
But, it is an interesting side by side comparison of amazing writers.
Nature writers are constantly probing, traumatizing, thrilling, and soothing their own minds-and by extension those of their readers-in quest not only of consciousness itself, but of an understanding of consciousness. Their descriptions of this exalted mental condition tend to be variable and elusive, their terminologies more suggestive than definitive. Thoreau himself (drawing upon classical sources and daily cycles for his imagery) favors the notion of "awakening"; Dillard and Abbey use the word "awareness" to describe this state, though for Dillard such activities as "seeing" and "stalking" are also metaphors for stimulated consciousness; Berry emphasizes "watchfulness" as a condition of profound alertness; and for Lopez, two complementary modes of "understanding" natural places, the "mathematical" and especially the "particularized" (or experiential)-serve as keys to mental elevation.
While Dillard's study of her own psychological processes may not be exactly thorough or systematic, it is both learned and empirical. Like James, she is undogmatic in that she espouses, at least in Pilgrim, no conspicuously sectarian beliefs, no formal theological systems, but rather tries to show the varieties of heightened natural awareness. Even James, after enumerating the basic attributes of mystical experience (ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity-all of which seem to fit the experiences Dillard describes in Pilgrim), voices in his "scientific" text what sounds like a personal argument for the acceptance of the mystical as an important mode of apprehending reality.
Ray Gonzalez titled his 1990 interview with Barry Lopez, "Landscapes of the Interior: The Literature of Hope," and this captures precisely the approach that I try to take in this book. Nature writing is a "literature of hope" in its assumption that the elevation of consciousness may lead to wholesome political change, but this literature is also concerned, and perhaps primarily so, with interior landscapes, with the mind itself.
Thoreau asserted that "What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own" , an idea closely echoed in Barry Lopez's prologue to Arctic Dreams. For Thoreau, this "wildness" is an ideal quality of nature, a source of refreshment and awareness. And this particular sentence suggests that what leads us to discern wildness is the mere hint that something is alien to ourselves-thus the key to wildness is otherness. Still, this does not revoke the distinction between man and nature. Despite the implications here that nature influences human feelings and even possesses a moral significance for the observer, there is no merging of subject and object, no moment of "Emersonian or American Sublime" when, as Harold Bloom puts it, "the spirit, transparent to itself, knows its own splendor, and by knowing that knows again all things”.
The echoes of John Muir and Wallace Stegner are unmistakable here, but Berry adds something new. These patches of wilderness-not just vast and remote ones, but also nearby corners of farmyards and city lots-help to give us perspective on our lives by showing that there are forces and processes, or "natural economies," as Berry calls them, beyond our own. Yet Berry's intention is not to deepen the apparent disjunction between man and nature, or to imply that we can go to the wilderness "to escape the ugliness and the dangers" of civilization. He writes: "The wild and the domestic now often seem isolated values, estranged from one another. And yet these are not exclusive polarities like good and evil. There can be continuity between them, and there must be.” What Berry advocates in our dealings with nature, and what I think his own writing effectively demonstrates, is the necessity of careful, limited impact. The wholesale humanization of nature would be misguided on the part of either the farmer or the writer, but utter detachment and nonengagement is not the answer, either.
We use his writing as a ramp or a springboard-as a guided "preparatory meditation," to lift a term from the puritan poet Edward Taylor-toward a newly receptive state of mind. Then when we put down Arctic Dreams, or another such work, we are ready to see the world we inhabit, if not an Arctic tundra or a damp northwestern forest, then perhaps rolling ranchlands of fire ant mounds and subtle wildflowers, or an urban landscape with its teasing interplay of cement and vegetation. Slovic
Overall, an interesting view of some of my favorite authors. I think it is another misleading title, what does awareness mean to people, anyways? The technical definition is ‘knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists.’ I was thinking of it as “seeing,” that is, as a deep dive into how being in nature and looking and seeing opens up vistas in our minds that opens and exhilarates, that wakes us up from sleepwalking through life, which too many seem to be doing.
What the book seems to be about is the psychological aspects themes of these nature writers, how they describe how we think and make thoughts, how our consciousness is, essentially. The author combs through all the material written about the authors’ works and adds his consciousness analysis. I just found myself puzzled by literary cri tics. The way they receive and analyze seems unlike mine, and an interesting study in itself of how we can all read the same book or essay and absorb and interpret it differently.
When I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, living in the urban concrete jungle of Manhattan, I was put off by the massive amounts of insects in the book, but when I got further in, I was mesmerized by the way a simple walk in nature could cause that much mystical awe and I had to go find it myself. She taught me how to see. Not how to be religious, or self-conscious, or unself-conscious, but simply to see beauty, accompanied by some of the rich traditions of what religious people do or say when they encounter it. The author writes at some length about a time Dillard went up on a plane, once, and whatever he absorbed from it seemed like the least important thing about it. To me.
But, it is an interesting side by side comparison of amazing writers.
Nature writers are constantly probing, traumatizing, thrilling, and soothing their own minds-and by extension those of their readers-in quest not only of consciousness itself, but of an understanding of consciousness. Their descriptions of this exalted mental condition tend to be variable and elusive, their terminologies more suggestive than definitive. Thoreau himself (drawing upon classical sources and daily cycles for his imagery) favors the notion of "awakening"; Dillard and Abbey use the word "awareness" to describe this state, though for Dillard such activities as "seeing" and "stalking" are also metaphors for stimulated consciousness; Berry emphasizes "watchfulness" as a condition of profound alertness; and for Lopez, two complementary modes of "understanding" natural places, the "mathematical" and especially the "particularized" (or experiential)-serve as keys to mental elevation.
While Dillard's study of her own psychological processes may not be exactly thorough or systematic, it is both learned and empirical. Like James, she is undogmatic in that she espouses, at least in Pilgrim, no conspicuously sectarian beliefs, no formal theological systems, but rather tries to show the varieties of heightened natural awareness. Even James, after enumerating the basic attributes of mystical experience (ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, and passivity-all of which seem to fit the experiences Dillard describes in Pilgrim), voices in his "scientific" text what sounds like a personal argument for the acceptance of the mystical as an important mode of apprehending reality.
Ray Gonzalez titled his 1990 interview with Barry Lopez, "Landscapes of the Interior: The Literature of Hope," and this captures precisely the approach that I try to take in this book. Nature writing is a "literature of hope" in its assumption that the elevation of consciousness may lead to wholesome political change, but this literature is also concerned, and perhaps primarily so, with interior landscapes, with the mind itself.
Thoreau asserted that "What we call wildness is a civilization other than our own" , an idea closely echoed in Barry Lopez's prologue to Arctic Dreams. For Thoreau, this "wildness" is an ideal quality of nature, a source of refreshment and awareness. And this particular sentence suggests that what leads us to discern wildness is the mere hint that something is alien to ourselves-thus the key to wildness is otherness. Still, this does not revoke the distinction between man and nature. Despite the implications here that nature influences human feelings and even possesses a moral significance for the observer, there is no merging of subject and object, no moment of "Emersonian or American Sublime" when, as Harold Bloom puts it, "the spirit, transparent to itself, knows its own splendor, and by knowing that knows again all things”.
The echoes of John Muir and Wallace Stegner are unmistakable here, but Berry adds something new. These patches of wilderness-not just vast and remote ones, but also nearby corners of farmyards and city lots-help to give us perspective on our lives by showing that there are forces and processes, or "natural economies," as Berry calls them, beyond our own. Yet Berry's intention is not to deepen the apparent disjunction between man and nature, or to imply that we can go to the wilderness "to escape the ugliness and the dangers" of civilization. He writes: "The wild and the domestic now often seem isolated values, estranged from one another. And yet these are not exclusive polarities like good and evil. There can be continuity between them, and there must be.” What Berry advocates in our dealings with nature, and what I think his own writing effectively demonstrates, is the necessity of careful, limited impact. The wholesale humanization of nature would be misguided on the part of either the farmer or the writer, but utter detachment and nonengagement is not the answer, either.
Displaying 1 of 1 review