Compare 2 of the following excerpts in relation to their ideas on Nature and/or Wilderness:
“The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds, — the creaking of trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn." -- Nathanael Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown", 1835
"Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith.There I feel that nothing can befall me in life,— no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature" (1836)
"The Indian and the white man sense things differently because the white man has put distance between himself and nature; and assuming a lofty place in the scheme of order of things has lost for him both reverence and understanding. (...) Many times the Indian is embarrassed and baffled by the wine man's allusions to nature in such terms as crude, primitive, wild, rude, untamed, and savage. For the Lakota, mountains, lakes, rivers, springs, valleys, and woods were all finished beauty; winds, rain, snow, sunshine, day, night, and change of seasons brought interest, birds, insects, and animals filled the world with knowledge that defied the discernment of man."
Luther Standing Bear, "Nature", in Land of the Spotted Eagle, 1933
"Take this quote from Howard Nemerov, a good poet anda decent man:
Civilization, mirrored in the language, is the garden where relations grow; outside the garden is the wild abyss.
The unexamined assumptions here are fascinating. They are, at work, crystallizations of the erroneous view that enable the developed world to display Third and Fourth world peoples and overexploit nature golly. Nemerov here proposes that language is somehow implicitly civilized or civilizing that civilization is orderly, that intrahuman relations are the pinnacle of experience (as though all of us, and all life on the planet, were not interrelated), and that 'wild' means 'abyssal,' disorderly and chaotic."
Gary Snyder, "Unnatural Writing," in A Place in Space, 1996.
