Alone together
Henry David Thoreau “wished to live deliberately.” So he built a cabin in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts, and cataloged his thoughts while living alone there for two years in Walden.
Henry Beston decamped to a cottage on Cape Cod overlooking the Atlantic Ocean for a fortnight, but when the fortnight ended, he found he could not go: “The longer I stayed, the more eager I was to know this coast.” He decided to stay for a year, and wrote The Outermost House.
Annie Dillard wanted to “see what I could see” right around her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She spent a year looking, and published her observations in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
These are just a few of the celebrated authors who intentionally isolated themselves in nature to better understand something about their place in the world. Their mantra: think globally, write locally.
But you don’t need to be a writer to hone your sense of place. In fact, Dillard considered it “our original intent” to “discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”
Her “why” was existential, but we all know “why” we’ve been “so startlingly set down” this spring. With insight from these accomplished isolators, we can gain new perspective on “where.”
Look closely
When I reached out to Daniel Payne, a professor of English at SUNY College at Oneonta who specializes in environmental literature, for his thoughts on the matter, he happened to have just finished leading a remote discussion on Walden with one of his classes.
“It’s interesting too because one of the things we were talking about was how people are going out into nature more in response to the covid-19 strictures,” he said. “We don’t have much we can do except work and walk.”
For the increasing number of us turning to nature for company during this time of social isolation, Payne said these writers offer relatable examples for how to engage.
“Although they wrote about nature, they weren’t scientists,” he said. “They were close observers of nature, just as one can be a close reader of literature.”
Because they paid attention to the minutiae of nature, they were able to piece together how things fit into a larger system, and extrapolate meaning from the details.
“Thoreau wrote in his journal, ‘I look for that fact that may someday blossom into a truth.’” Payne said, “He was looking for patterns.”
Throughout The Outermost House, Beston transforms the mundane into the meaningful.
Noticing a school of herring offshore thwarted in their attempt to migrate up a stream by debris in the channel, he writes, “I began to reflect on Nature’s eagerness to sow life everywhere, to fill the planet with it, to crowd with it the earth, the air, and the seas. Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks.”
Think of your forgotten garden, overrun with weeds, your forgotten gutters, clogged with moss, your forgotten lasagna, garnished with mold.
Dillard put it more plainly: “Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot?”
- Practice: Next time you head outside for a walk, choose a point to stop and take a close look at something — a crack in the sidewalk, a puddle, a rotting log, a tree, the debris in your gutters. What details do you notice? How do they connect to a larger system? Can you find a boot?
Look up
Something of a contrarian, Thoreau was adamant about his preference for solitude, focusing on where he fit into the big picture. The really big picture.
“This whole earth which we inhabitant is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star?” It was a leading question. He wonders then, “What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.”
FaceTime, Zoom, and Google Hangouts are currently proving his point.
Henry Beston, too, felt grounded by the night sky. Orion was his favorite constellation, a constant reference and companion throughout The Outermost House.
“It happens to be my favorite constellation, too,” said Payne. (He wrote a biography of Beston, called Orion on the Dunes). “In our hemisphere, when you see Orion in the southern sky at night, it situates you,” he said. “It helps you to feel at home in the universe.”
- Practice: On a clear night, step outside to look at the stars, without guidance from your smartphone. Let your eyes settle on a pattern. Make note of where it is, how many stars it comprises, what it looks like when you squint. Once back inside, you may use the Internet to figure out what you were looking at. Congratulations! You now have a favorite constellation. It will always be there to help you feel at home in the universe. Unless you chose one that sets seasonally. Don’t worry, it’ll be back.
Look actively
Although lesser known today, John Burroughs was an extremely popular nature writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who had a knack for bringing the outdoors alive through his writing.
“When you read his essays, it’s almost like going on a vicarious walk with someone who knows nature well, and is pointing out things to you that if you look hard enough, you can see too,” Payne said.
Burroughs didn’t walk absentmindedly — he found “the air and the water exhilarating,” he was “thrilled by the stars at night,” and “elated over a bird’s nest” — he walked with an expectation of discovery, and an intent to share what he found.
Payne pointed out that Rachel Carson, who was a marine scientist and writer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, embodied this spirit too. Although she’s best known for Silent Spring, a groundbreaking exposé on chemical pesticides, her earlier books were engaging descriptions of the natural world. “The Edge of the Sea is about walking on the shoreline and observing the things you can find both on the shore and under the water,” he said.
(Food for thought: Beston and Carson had a close friendship that developed from a distance through letters before they met in person. Maybe now’s a good time to find a pen pal?)
- Practice: As a warm-up for active looking, Payne recommends writing a haiku. “Haiku is all about seeing and capturing a moment,” he said. Choose a place to focus your observations — a pond, a park, your garden — and start by just walking around the area with your senses fully engaged. Then grab a notebook, and walk around the area again, making note of specific images and sensations that stuck with you. Now, sit down and try packaging your observations into a haiku — a three-line poem, defined by the number of syllables in each line (5, 7, 5). If you can convince your family to participate, read your haikus aloud to see what each of you noticed.
Look inward
While being alone with your thoughts for the foreseeable future may seem daunting, these authors show us that isolation can be liberating. As Beston put it, shutting off society creates an opportunity for people to “open their doors” to nature.
And Burroughs reminds us to keep sight of what is waiting right on our threshold. “Look under foot. You are always nearer to the true sources of your powers than you think. The lure of the distant and difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Don’t despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.”
Yes, we are all looking forward to the end of this time of anxious uncertainty. But in this moment, what can we control? What can we gain? And what do we want to hold onto?
- Practice: Keep a journal. “All serious writers do, and I think most serious walkers and observers would benefit from it as well,” Payne said. “Especially during these times, because at the very least, someday we’ll be able to look back on what happened, and be astounded by what we lived through.”
