Colin Fletcher ★★★★★
Well written. Nature as philosophy. I found the reverence that Colin extends to the simple little understandings that come upon you while alone in the wild thought provoking. The effort he expends to put himself in a location and state of mind where he can get inside of the rocks, the creatures, the historic inhabitants of the canyon impressed me. We’re talking about the sort of revelations you only get while alone. I think I’ve experienced just enough of these (or at least their edges) to get what he’s writing about. I’ve never thought to prepare a nest for them like he describes though. I think I, perhaps, don’t give them the same credence he does. They’re the kind of thing I historically dismiss as /not real/ or /not important/, or maybe don’t experience to the same depth as other people (like I struggled to empathize with C. S. Lewis’s Joy concepts). Although I do think I have the potential to grant the wilderness revelations a greater importance than I do right now. And I would like to try it next time I am out and about.
"I was thinking, I imagine, of the rich potential of man. Thinking hopefully of a time that might quite soon come when he learns not merely new knowledge but new humility, and so new wisdom. A time when his know-how will run less rampant and he will learn the value of "feel-how": to balance, to curb, and to inspire. A time when treason will have become a meaningless word and patriotism is judged a crime. A time when he lives in harmony not only with the rest of the animal world but with the rock and rolling hills, with the forests and rivers, with the desert and the oceans and the uncorrupted air—not for any imagined altruistic reason but because he understands that it is the only way he can survive."
"I had brought only this one camera down into the Canyon, and at first I simmered with frustration. But within an hour I discovered a new fact of life. I recognized, quite clearly, that photography is not really compatible with contemplation. Its details are too insistent. They are always buzzing around your mind and clouding the fine focus of appreciation. You rarely detect this interference at the time, and cannot do much about it even if you do. But that Morning of the Serpentine reconnaissance, after the camera had broken, I found myself freed from an impediment I had not known existed. I had escaped the tyranny of film. Now, when I came to something interesting, I no longer stopped, briefly, to photograph and forget; I stood and stared, fixing truer images on the emulsion of memory.”
"It was very beautiful. Yet I found, a little sadly, that the birth of this final day had not really inspired me as it should have done, and it occurred to me that perhaps I was sated with beauty and grandeur. The world is not, unfortunately, all beauty or all grandeur. And what I needed now, as a corrective, was some ugliness and some pettiness. I would drive home, I decided, through Las Vegas."
"Now, every sunlit desert morning has a magic moment. It may come at five o'clock, at seven, or at eleven, depending on the weather and the season. But it comes. If you are in the right mood at the right time you are suddenly aware that the desert's countless cogs have meshed. That the world has crystallized into vivid focus. And you respond. You hold your breath or fall into a reverie or spring to your feet, according to the day and the mood."
"I had freed myself from our dogmas. Only in my faintest moments could I revert to the vision of man as a being whose valid aim in life is to snuffle around fretting over the future of his individual soul or some similar artifact. Instead, I would see him—and not just intellectually any longer—as a natural and still-moving-forward outgrowth of everything that preceded him, as another quantum in the continuing trajectory of life. I would see each individual man as an organism beginning to emerge from the cushioned realm of instinct into the uncharted and frightful arena of intellect. As an animal still a long way from being rational, but one at last tinged with rationality. As the first animal privileged and condemned to self-awareness. As a creature, therefore, of tears and laughter. As a creature, above all, that was moving forward in the inescapable grip of time—moving forward from the hand-to-mouth existence of simple stone houses and cliff dwellings into richer though more dangerous realms of potential. So for me, now, it would always be “man, the exciting animal.” A phenomenon that sometimes, overreaching, scattered metal and corpses, horribly, across silent rock. But a phenomenon that sometimes, reaching out as it must, would fly two shining metal monsters fifty feet apart at almost the speed of sound through a narrow chasm a mile down in the face of the earth, quite needlessly and quite magnificently."