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Show ZEPHYR/OCTOBER-NOVEMBER 2005 : “The evergreen woods had a decidedly sweet and bracing fragrance, the air was a sort of diet-drink ...” Locked in north woods travel, Thoreau “fronted” change and contradiction and mystery. But he’s always doing that, whether in Concord’s pastoral scenes or in wilderness extremities. Nature and man, a shifty duality. He adheres stubbornly to nature and the self as inevitably bound together in a changeful continuity rather than as static storehouse of analogies and correspondences. That is one prime feature that makes his work relevant to us, today. The Synergy Company” GP? Wit www. thesynergycompany.com iy institutions and society, but must front the true source of evil.” (4) This bare-boned shocker is preceded, nine lines up the same page, by a sentence nearly astoral: < “259-5366 F.O. Matthiessen claimed that Thoreau’s “more characteristic mood is that of the Sunday worshiper of Pan.” (5) That’s misleading. I like to think of Thoreau Tne Moab Tree Planting Partnership (MTPP)---a joint effort by The Synergy Co. & Moonflower Market that supports the planting, maintenance & protection of trees in our Community as an investigative reporter. When in that role, he plays no favorites. Further, if we take seriously his north woods writing, we have to note that worshiperis not a useful term for experiencing that text. We have to notice that his characterizing of nature often emerges, not from passive or rapt observation, but from human striving. The War Between the States ushered in the Gilded Age, a relentless march into industrial conquest, Manifest Destiny and more war, bringing with them a strain of nature writing and promotion that valorized dwindling tracts of unbridled nature as refuges for troubled souls. The rift between nature and our burdensome lives, of which Thoreau continually complained, widened. Today, our great disappointment seems tobe that there wy are so few places on earth untrammeled by our species. That was not Thoreau’s attitude. His disappointment was that the Indians were not wild enough to point the way toward a full engagement with nature, a human presence, a revolutionary move into the wild. He was a visitor to the north woods, but he tried to imagine a life there. Wildness alone will not preserve the world. Ellen Meloy grasps this nettle firmly. In e | \ oN =i é Purchase Synergy's és { =. The Last Cheater”s Waltz she explores a century where science ventured into the subatomic structure of the universe and waged war on an unimaginable scale. The consequences are now everywhere, embedded in us and in skies, oceans, snow, ice, tundra, farmlands, forests, the dust of cities, the very fabrics of mountain waters. organic & 100% natural whole-food nutritional supplements at Moonflower Market (at special ‘local-supergood-guy/gal' discount prices) & support MITPP's future. “Out here in the red-boned desert, I once thought, the human voice seemed less consequential than in other places, at best a remote echo of intellectual asceticism. Now it was the only voice I heard, the desert itself an accomplice to betrayal.” (6 Meloy has seen huge tracts of land set aside for military experiments; she has travelled Nevada test sites upwind of Salt Lake City, White Sands, Alamagordo, Los Alamos (where tourists can buy little chocolates shaped like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). She returns to the eight acres of desert land “owned” by her and her husband, and there, with a hugely expanded sense of place, she takes her stand. Locked in north woods travel, Thoreau "fronted" change and contradiction and mystery. But he's always doing that... Nature and Man, a shifty duality. “... try to live here as if there is no other place and it must last forever. It is the best we can do. Everyone”’s home is the heartland of consequence.” Synergy & Moonflower Market local folks dedicated to supporting the Moab community’’s health in many good ways! WHY SUBSCRIBE TO THE ZEPHYR? BECAUSE IT’ S THE RIGHT THING TO DO. SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION ON PAGE 6 Val Plumbwood, makes a similar claim: “... the conception of the self, and the conception of nature ... normally such essential relation would involve particularity, through connection to and friendship for particular places, forests, animals, to which one is particularly strongly related or attached and toward which one has specific and meaningful, not merely abstract, responsibilities of care.”” Emphasis in original. (7) And Thoreau, on the Allegash: “T believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,--not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house--and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.” (8) Fellowship, Responsibility, Adherence to Consequence. These are born of our nature FROM FOOTPRINTS 121 EAST 100 SOUTH #108 MOAB, UT 84532 800.635.5280 when, or if, we front the world. References (1) The Maine Woods, 70. Princeton University Press, 1972. Paperback Reprint. (2) Cape Cod. 126-27. Ticknor and Fields, 1864. (3) The Maine Woods, 103-04 (4) The Maine Woods,16. (5) Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance. Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford University Press, 1941. (6) Meloy, Ellen. The Last Cheaters Waltz. University of Arizona Press, 1999. (7) Plumwood, Val. Nature, Self and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism, in Environmental Philosophy. Michael Zimmerman et al. Prentice-Hall, 1998. (8) The Maine Woods, 181. THOREAU ONCE MORE Can’’t seem to stay away from this man’s work. Maybe because so often it literally forces further thought. “What a cold-blooded fellow! [a muskrat] Thoughts at a low temperature, sitting perfectly still so long on ice covered with water ... What safe, low, moderate thoughts it must have! It does not get on to stilts.” Journal, Nov. 25, 1850. I fasten on “safe” and “moderate,” wondering if safe, middle of-the road thoughts are being honored here, and I recall Jim Hightower’s remark that the middle of the road has GONE FISHIN’ Make up your own damn TOP 10 LIST nothing but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But two days earlier we have Thoreau in a more cut-and-slash mood: “I find it to be the height of wisdom not to endeavor to oversee myself and live a life of prudence and common sense, but to see over and above myself, entertain sublime conjectures, to make myself the thoroughfare of thrilling thoughts, live all that can be lived. The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he not do?” Journal, Nov. 23, 1850. It’s like running rapids, you never know how rough or beautiful or dangerous or just plain tame the next run might be. That makes good reading! PAGED § |