On Not Observing Nature

By Roger Rosenblatt

I do my writing while sitting in a living-room chair with its back at an angle to a picture window. The midsummer morning light strikes my legal notepad. August has slipped in like a lover. Every once in a while I turn toward the window and see, over my left shoulder, a tall pine tree that has split into two trunks at its base. The dead lower branches have been severed, leaving large tan coins on the bark. But the tree flourishes near the top in an array of green fans that rise and fall like a queen's hand. All shades of green are displayed, many so subtle they have no names. Though I have looked at this tree for years, the sight of it always surprises me nicely.

This would not have been true when I was in my 30s and 40s. I have only recently developed an affection for nature. My contemporaries seem to be leaning in the same direction. Friends who used to watch only baseball games now also watch birds. When we visit one another, we make treks through woods or take to waterways and mountain trails. For them, this all may represent a return to nature, but I cannot recall being there in the first place.

My appreciation is mostly unconscious, as it was when I was a boy wandering by myself in city parks where trees watched over me, or when I walked down sand-and-weed roads in Cape Cod and felt the sea grass brush against my thighs. I never studied nature, and I do not now. The closest I have come to study is to reread the great nature writers--David Quammen, Edward Hoagland, Peter Matthiessen, Annie Dillard and the poet Ted Hughes--and to pick up some sensory information through their wide-open eyes.

Writing in midsummer, Hughes describes "An August Salmon" spawning:

His beauty bleeding invisibly From every lift of his gills.

He gulps, awkward in his ponderous regalia, But his eye stays rapt, Elephantine, Arctic-- A god, on earth for the first time, With the clock of love and death in his body.

In 1979, Dillard drove across the Cascades in central Washington to watch and write about a "Total Eclipse" of the sun. She connected the eclipse to the mind's fragility: "A loosened circle of evening sky...was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disc; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disc of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed."

Writers like that see so clearly, it's blinding. But the less keen, unconscious eye receives lessons of its own, and the one I seem to be learning is my place, our place, in the natural order or disorder. As one grows closer to being part of the earth, one begins to sense the basic equality of living things. Human beings dominate trees and the other animals, of course, and like all world leaders we have been at times murderous, at times protective. But these days any feeling of dominance I might have entertained has long gone, replaced by a companionable democracy. I feel less like the king of the hill and more like the hill.

As a result, my observations of nature are minimally observant. When Dillard wanted to see insects in flight, she focused on a column of air ahead of them and caught them as they swarmed into view. I simply look at insects, flowers, oceans, without plans or thoughts. I do not think about what nature means to my soul either. For nature's philosophers like Thoreau and Wordsworth, going out meant going in, but for me it means going out and farther out.

I find myself dumbly staring at the sun glint on a strand of spiderweb for many minutes at a stretch without being aware of what I am doing. The other afternoon I watched a gray bird (I can't name genus, order, family or phylum) tap-dance down the slant of the garage roof like Gene Kelly in an acrobatic number, and not a single conclusion occurred to me. Even now I apply the Gene Kelly comparison retroactively; it did not arise at the time. I was responding to some unarticulated need to watch that bird, to a desire to be lost in watching.

Similarly, when I write, I feel the need to be lost in a place away from my writing, so I look out at the pine tree. I am neither inspired nor instructed by the sight. At most I am reassured that both the tree and I are still here. Perhaps I simply enjoy the fact that we are here at all.

As the sun rises, it spreads gold leaf on one side of the bark and leaves the other side in shadow. About halfway up, the branches form broken arms and do whatever is necessary to get to the light. From my chair I cannot see the very top of the tree, and I never try. There is another tree beyond the one I look at, and several beyond that.