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Milosz on Nature · Oct 4, 09:04 PM
To be forced into a confrontation with nature. For example, to find oneself in the mountain forests somewhere along the Feather River, unprotected among the boulders, the five-foot-thick trunks of pines, the maze of dry, parched earth. We are usually protected, to some degree, by the praise and condemnation we portion out, by the part we take in exchanging boasts and deceptions, by clinging to one another—the scientist concentrates on other scientists, the printer on other printers, the artist on other artists, the politician on other politicians. All this makes for a cocoon of constantly renewed dependencies, which infuses time with value—progress, regression, evolution, revolution, a revolution in the preparation of dyes, topless bathing suits. The deeper we immerse ourselves in that cocoon woven of speech, pictures moving on screens, paper spat out of rotary presses, the safer we are. But the consistency of that cocoon varies and is different from one country to the next. I do not wish to play games with chains of causes and effects, and so will simply acknowledge that this continent possesses something like a spirit which malevolently undoes any attempts to subdue it. The enormity of the violated but always victorious expanse, the undulant skin of the earth diminishes our errors and merits. In the presence of the pines by the Feather River, or on rocky promontories spattered by the ocean’s white explosions where the wind bears the barking of sea lions, or on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, where the border of ocean and land, shattered into promontories, looks like the first day of creation, I stand stripped and destitute. I have not achieved anything, I have taken no part in evolution or revolution, I can boast of nothing, for here the entire collective game of putting oneself above or beneath others falls apart. Strangeness, indifference, eternal stone, stone-like eternity, and compared to it, I am a split second of tissue, nerve, pumping heart, and, worst of all, I am subject to the same incomprehensible law ruling what is here before me, which I see only as self-contained and opposed to all meaning. [“Facing Too Large an Expanse,” from To Begin Where I Am (2001)]
Now that is what usually drives a person toward God, that great totalizer; but I remain a skeptical savage, on the outside looking in; or on the inside looking out. Filled with wonder but without a clue.
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