Quotes from my class text
Nov. 8th, 2005 10:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
urbpanMy class text is The Norton Book of Nature Writing and we've been reading selections from it. If nothing else, this class is forcing me to read authors who I should have been studying closely for decades. Each author's selection includes some piece that jumps out at me. Starting with Emerson's bold declaration of Pantheism and moving through the ages, here's my selected quotations:
"The foregoing generatoins beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? *** The sun shines today also *** Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have not questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson from Nature
"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildnes, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature rather than a member of society. *** To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man *** I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest ***"
-Henry David Thoreau from Walking
"We all travel the milky way together, trees and men;" -John Muir from "A Wind-Storm in the Forests"
"The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end." -Ernest Thompson Seton from Wild Animals I Have Known
"[In Tuscany] the intensive culture of vine and olive and wheat, by the ceaseless industry of naked human hands and winter-shod feet, and slow-stepping soft-eyed oxen does not devastate a country, does not denude it, does not lay it bare, does not uncover its nakedness, does not drive away Pan or his chidren. *** Which shows that it can be done. Man can live on the earth and by the earth without disfiguring the earth."
-D.H.Lawrence from Flowery Tuscany
And we haven't read him in class yet, but peeking ahead, I found this quote from David Quammen, which inspires my interests greatly:
"Biology has great potential for vulgar entertainment."
"The foregoing generatoins beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? *** The sun shines today also *** Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.
Undoubtedly we have not questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson from Nature
"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildnes, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature rather than a member of society. *** To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man *** I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest ***"
-Henry David Thoreau from Walking
"We all travel the milky way together, trees and men;" -John Muir from "A Wind-Storm in the Forests"
"The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end." -Ernest Thompson Seton from Wild Animals I Have Known
"[In Tuscany] the intensive culture of vine and olive and wheat, by the ceaseless industry of naked human hands and winter-shod feet, and slow-stepping soft-eyed oxen does not devastate a country, does not denude it, does not lay it bare, does not uncover its nakedness, does not drive away Pan or his chidren. *** Which shows that it can be done. Man can live on the earth and by the earth without disfiguring the earth."
-D.H.Lawrence from Flowery Tuscany
And we haven't read him in class yet, but peeking ahead, I found this quote from David Quammen, which inspires my interests greatly:
"Biology has great potential for vulgar entertainment."
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Date: 2005-11-08 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2005-11-08 06:24 pm (UTC)Ooooh, winter reading!
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Date: 2005-11-08 09:45 pm (UTC)"I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues."