In his stirring meditation on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman asked: “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?” He answered simply: “Nature remains.”

But between Whitman’s day and our own, as we have poured our business and politics onto nature, nature has ceased to be the inexhaustible constant Whitman took it to be. This is what marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson intuited when, a decade before she catalyzed the modern environmental movement, she quit her government job in a grey Washington office not far from where Whitman had once lived and cautioned in a prescient letter as she watched a heedless administration assault nature for commercial gain: “The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife… Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.”

The sanctity of that wealth and the urgency of its stewardship is what Terry Tempest Williams, a Carson of our time, explores from the singular intersection of the personal, the political, and the ecological in The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks (public library) — an elegy, in the proper dual sense of lamentation and celebration, for the wilderness; a lyrical clarion call for reexamining the complex interleafing of our ecological relationships and our responsibilities as politically wakeful citizens and creatures among creatures; an invitation to reckoning and a roadmap to redemption.

Terry Tempest Williams (Photograph: Cheryl Himmelstein)

Contemplating what draws 300 million visitors a year to America’s national parks, Williams writes:

Perhaps it is not so much what we learn that matters in these moments of awe and wonder, but what we feel in relationship to a world beyond ourselves, even beyond our own species.

Two centuries after Alexander von Humboldt pioneered the notion that the natural world is a web of intricately entwined elements in constant dialogue with one another and asserted that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” Williams paints these vital and vitalizing preserves of wilderness as a supreme sanctuary of that awareness:

I see our national parks as our ongoing struggle as a diverse people to create circles of reverence in a time of collective cynicism where we are wary of being moved by anything but our own clever perspective… The nature of our national parks is bound to the nature of our own humility, our capacity to stay open and curious in a world that instead beckons closure through fear.

[…]

Our national parks are blood. They are more than scenery, they are portals and thresholds of wonder, an open door that swings back and forth from our past to our future.

One of Chiura Obata’s paintings of Yosemite

As Williams visits a dozen of these precious boundary-worlds, as varied as the Gulf Islands seashore, Glacier National Park, and Alcatraz Island, she reflects on them as a kind of observatory for discovering the largest dimensions of existence in the splendid smallnesses that constellate it. From Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, she writes:

To watch spring arrive on the wings of a pair of red-tailed hawks as they circle each other in amorous display is not a small thing, but a source of amazement at how they find their way back to the same nest each year.

To see the yellow fritillaries burst forth after the deep snows of winter and know that the bears are soon to follow is to be attentive to wild nature’s seasonal fugue of infinite composition and succession. The great gray owl sitting on a snag near Sawmill Ponds is not simply a bird but a heightened intelligence with golden eyes behind a mask of feathers.

And yet, as shaped as these wild refuges may be by our intentions and policies, they remain — and must remain — wildly beyond our control. In a sentiment that calls to mind poet Jane Hirshfield’s insistence on the life-expanding value of threshold spaces, Williams writes:

No matter how much we try to manage and manipulate, orchestrate, or regulate our national parks, they will remain as the edge-scapes they are, existing on the boundaries between culture and wildness — improvisational spaces immune to the scripts of anyone. Wildlife in wildlands appear without notice. Awakened is what we become in their presence. Curiosity leads us forward on an unknown path, even if it is a path of well-placed steps made out of pink granite here in Acadia. For a precious moment we touch and taste life uninterrupted. Awe sneaks up on us like love. We surrender to the ecstatic outpouring of life before us.

Photograph by Maria Popova

In consonance with trailblazing Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd’s assertion that “place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” Williams considers the ceaseless dynamic interaction between our interiority and our physical surrounding:

To be situated in place is to be engaged in a reciprocity where survival, both physical and spiritual, depends on our understanding of gestures. I believe necessity drives us to improvisation where improbable and sustaining gestures create moments of grace that take care of us. We continue to evolve and transform who we are in relationship to where we are. We do not live in isolation from the physical world around us. Nature beckons our response. It is in the doing, the being, the becoming that meaning is made. What becomes sacred is the act itself — not what remains. Something inexplicable is set into motion.

[…]

Our fate, like the fate of all species, is determined by chance, by circumstance, and by grace.

One of the loveliest aspects of Williams’s prose and her orientation to ecological responsibility is the unflinching critical thinking with which she approaches the subject, at the same time refusing to perpetrate one of the great cultural crimes of our time — the tendency to mistake cynicism, that toxic calcification of the soul, for critical thinking. Her rhetoric is rigorously reasoned and passionately uncynical, precise yet poetic. Writing from Big Bend National Park in Texas, she reminds us that nature itself is our mightiest antidote to cynicism:

Big Bend is no place for cynics. There is too much at stake. A bedrock pragmatism refutes sentimentality through the beauty of the unexpected. What we mistake as sentimental is in fact a generosity, a willingness to stay open and acknowledge the miraculous.

Cynicism flourishes in air-conditioned rooms. Like any true place, the desert is a risk. Back into a barrel cactus and you may get hurt. But touch its yellow flowers with petals like wax and the pain from its needles lessens. Our fear of being touched removes us from a sensate world. The distant self becomes the detached self who no longer believes in anything. Awe is the moment when ego surrenders to wonder. This is our inheritance — the beauty before us. We cry. We cry out. There is nothing sentimental about facing the desert bare. It is a terrifying beauty.

Photograph by Maria Popova

Standing on the Atlantic shoreline of Acadia National Park, Williams echoes the biological and poetic truth Rachel Carson so memorably articulated nearly a century earlier in her pioneering essay on the life of the ocean — “Against this cosmic background the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.” — and writes:

Each breaking wave, each rush of the sea on the slope of sand, reminds me why these places of pilgrimage matter. They matter to me because in the long view, I do not. I am driftwood. I am rockweed. I am osprey and the mackerel in the clutch of her feet. I am a woman standing on the edge of the continent looking out.

Just as we cope with the disorientation of living in a relative universe by grasping for artificial absolutes — a maladaptive coping mechanism that seems to be a bug of human consciousness — we cope with this awareness of our smallness and finitude by grasping for control and domination of the expansive natural world that lies beyond us. Decades after the theologian Thomas Merton wrote in his fan letter to Rachel Carson we suffer from a civilizational sickness leading us to believe that “in order to ‘survive’ we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends,” Williams writes:

The irony of our existence is this: We are infinitesimal in the grand scheme of evolution, a tiny organism on Earth. And yet, personally, collectively, we are changing the planet through our voracity, the velocity of our reach, our desires, our ambitions, and our appetites. We multiply, our hunger multiplies, and our insatiable craving accelerates.

Consumption is a progressive disease.

We believe in more, more possessions, more power, more war. Anywhere, everywhere our advance of aggression continues.

My aggression toward myself is the first war.

Wilderness is an antidote to the war within ourselves.

Photograph by Maria Popova

A century and a half after Thoreau celebrated nature as a form of prayer, Williams adds:

How do we find our way back to a world interrelated and interconnected, whose priority is to thrive and evolve? What kind of belief systems are emerging now that reinforce and contribute to a world increasingly disconnected from nature? And what about the belief — my belief — in all that is wild?

I return to the wilderness to remember what I have forgotten, that the world can be wholesome and beautiful, that the harmony and integrity of ecosystems at peace is a mirror to what we have lost.

Williams considers the questions facing us — as individuals, as a nation, as a civilization — and the decisions we are called to make in the name of wholeness, beauty, harmony, and all that makes our Pale Blue Dot such a precious improbability of cosmic chance:

We are at a crossroads. We can continue on the path we have been on, in this nation that privileges profit over people and land; or we can unite as citizens with a common cause — the health and wealth of the Earth that sustains us. If we cannot commit to this kind of fundamental shift in our relationship to people and place, then democracy becomes another myth perpetuated by those in power who care only about themselves.

[…]

The time has come for acts of reverence and restraint on behalf of the Earth. We have arrived at the Hour of Land.

The Hour of Land — throughout which Williams maps the frontiers of hope and resistance through the noble work of artists, activists, and other emissaries of Thoreau’s ethos of civil disobedience as a force of justice — is a requisite, electrically rousing read in its entirety. Complement it with the story of Rachel Carson’s culture-shifting courage to speak inconvenient truth to power and Henry Beston — one of Carson’s great heroes and inspirations — on reclaiming our relationship with nature.

“What men are poets,” the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman asked in what may be the world’s most poetic footnote, “who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?” Two centuries before him, the poet William Wordsworth had insisted that “poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge… the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.”

I too have long cherished this unheralded common ground between poetry and science as complementary worldviews of contemplation and observation — a cherishment of which The Universe in Verse was born — and have encountered no more beautiful an articulation of it than the one Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) offered in the preface to her final poetry collection, Late in the Day (public library).

Ursula K. Le Guin by Benjamin Reed

Marine biologist Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the modern environmental movement and pioneered a new aesthetic of poetic writing about science, once asserted that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” More than half a century after Carson, Le Guin considers how poetry and science both humble us to that elemental aspect of our humanity and train us to be better stewards of the natural world to which we belong:

To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.

Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. Darwin first gave that knowledge a scientific basis. And now, both poets and scientists are extending the rational aspect of our sense of relationship to creatures without nervous systems and to non-living beings — our fellowship as creatures with other creatures, things with other things.

Decades after the trailblazing Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd contemplated the “intricate interplay” of the natural world in the living mountain, Le Guin adds:

Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal — always at least two-way, back-and-forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything — all beings — including what we generally class as things, objects.

Illustration by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

In consonance with the recently uncovered astonishing science of what trees feel and how they communicate, Le Guin adds:

Descartes and the behaviorists willfully saw dogs as machines, without feeling. Is seeing plants as without feeling a similar arrogance? One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as “natural resources,” is to class them as fellow beings — kinfolk.

In a sentiment that calls to mind quantum theory founding father Niels Bohr’s arresting meditation on subjective vs. objective reality, Le Guin reflects on the larger point:

I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.

Art by Lia Halloran from Your Body is a Space That Sees

Le Guin considers the shared impulse beneath poetry and science, flowing across the valve between self and world from opposite directions:

Poetry is the human language that can try to say what a tree or a rock or a river is, that is, to speak humanly for it, in both senses of the word “for.” A poem can do so by relating the quality of an individual human relationship to a thing, a rock or river or tree, or simply by describing the thing as truthfully as possible.

Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe. We need the languages of both science and poetry to save us from merely stockpiling endless “information” that fails to inform our ignorance or our irresponsibility.

Each, Le Guin argues, is a mode of tending to the world — the outer world, the inner world — and, as such, trains us to be better participants in and protectors of the vibrant, vigorous interconnectedness of which we are but a tiny part:

By replacing unfounded, willful opinion, science can increase moral sensitivity; by demonstrating and performing aesthetic order or beauty, poetry can move minds to the sense of fellowship that prevents careless usage and exploitation of our fellow beings, waste and cruelty.

[…]

The seventeenth-century Christian mystic Henry Vaughan wrote:

     So hills and valleys into singing break,
     And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue,
     While active winds and streams both run and speak,
     Yet stones are deep in admiration.

By admiration, Vaughan meant reverence for God’s sacred order of things, and joy in it, delight. By admiration, I understand reverence for the infinite connectedness, the naturally sacred order of things, and joy in it, delight. So we admit stones to our holy communion; so the stones may admit us to theirs.

Complement Late in the Day with an embodiment of that admiring delight in some beautiful poems celebrating science, then revisit Le Guin on growing older, the power of language to transform and redeem, storytelling as an instrument of freedom, her feminist translation of the Tao Te Ching, and her classic unsexing of gender.

When thirty-six-year-old Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in the summer of 1855, having poured the whole of his being into this unusual and daring labor of love, it fell upon unreceptive and downright hostile ears — a rejection that devastated the young poet. But over the coming decades, largely thanks to Emerson’s extraordinary letter of endorsement and encouragement, it became one of the most beloved books in America — a proto-viral masterpiece that forever changed the face and spirit of literature, bold and fresh and replete with “incomparable things said incomparably,” creaturely yet cosmic, bridging the earthly and the eternal yet larger than both.

Twenty-one years after Whitman’s death, Everyman’s Library series creator J.M. Dent published what remains the most beautiful edition of the Whitman classic — a large, lavish tome bound in green cloth, with the title emblazoned in gilt. But the crowning curio of this rare, spectacular 1913 edition — a surviving copy of which I was fortunate to acquire at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair — are twenty-four color plates by the English artist Margaret C. Cook.

“Two fishes swimming in the sea not more lawless than we”

Cook’s stunning illustrations, shockingly sensual against the backdrop of Puritanism against which Whitman staged his rebellion in verse, bear something of William Blake — particularly his engravings for Paradise Lost; something of Maurice Sendak (who was, of course, shaped by Blake) — particularly his forgotten sensual illustrations for Pierre by Whitman’s contemporary Herman Melville.

“You sea!… I behold… your crooked inviting fingers…,
I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phase”

“We found our own, O my Soul, in the calm and cool of the daybreak”

“Whose happiest days were far and away through fields, … he and another wandering”

“How calm, how solemn it grows to ascend the atmosphere of lovers”

“Living beings, identities now doubtless near us in the air that we know not of”

Radiating from Cook’s drawings is Whitman’s insurgent insistence, as a queer man and a lover of all life, that romantic and erotic love transcends the tight parameters of the heteronormative — that the heart, too, contains multitudes.

“I will sing the song of companionship”

“The sun and stars that float in the open air,
The apple-shaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is something grand,
I do not know what it is except that it is grand, and that it is happiness”

Most spectacular are Cook’s nocturnal scenes, fusing the sultry with the celestial — a consonant complement to Whitman’s lifelong fascination with astronomy, which would prompt him to write in Specimen Days a quarter century later:

To soothe and spiritualize, and, as far as may be, solve the mysteries of death and genius, consider them under the stars at midnight.

“Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death”

“Give me nights perfectly quiet… and I looking up at the stars”

“The tender and growing night”

“The night follows along, with millions of suns, and sleep, and restoring darkness”

“We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy”

“I see… great cloud-masses…
With at times half-dimm’d sadden’d far-off star”

I have digitized and restored Cook’s striking illustrations, and made them available as art prints, all proceeds from which will help support The Universe in Verse.

“The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from East to West”

“I will confront these shows of the day and night;
I will know if I am to be less than they,
I will see if I am not as majestic as they”

“They are calm, clear, well possess’d of themselves”

“I see my soul reflected in Nature,
As I see through a mist,
One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty,
See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see”

“The soul has that measureless pride which revolts from every lesson but its own”

“I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, wandering on our way,
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing”

“I musing late in the autumn day”

“The merriment of the two babes that crawl over the grass in the sun, the mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them”

“The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, the face of the sea almost touching,
The boy ecstatic”

“I have taken my stand on the basest of peninsulas and on the high embedded rocks, to cry thence:
‘Salut au monde!'”

For other stunning illustrations from special editions of literary classics, devour Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for Orwell’s Animal Farm, Aubrey Beardsley’s gender-defying illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Harry Clarke’s haunting illustrations for Goethe’s Faust, and Salvador Dalí’s paintings for Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and the essays of Montaigne.

Due to the pesky laws of physics enforcing the finitude of space, The Universe in Verse is sold out. But there is another wonderful celebration of poetry taking place in New York this month: On April 25, The Academy of American Poets (where I serve as Special Advisor) is hosting the 16th annual Poetry & the Creative Mind – a showcase of the many kinds of lives poetry touches and inspires, with creative minds ranging from actors to astrophysicists reading some of the world’s great poems. This year’s stellar lineup of readers includes Krista Tippett, Tim Daly, Patty Griffin, Terrance Hayes, Uma Thurman, and Janna Levin. They will be reading poems about everything from love to social justice to the nature of the universe.

GET YOUR TICKET