“At that moment, I was struck by an obvious fact that has never left me since: that the real philistines are not those people incapable of recognizing beauty—they recognize it only too well, with a flair as infallible as that of the subtlest aesthete, but only to pounce on it and smother it before it can take root in their universal empire of ugliness.”
You might think I would agree with the above quote. That is, until you read the article (it’s a quote within the essay) and find that “beauty” means, necessarily, what was created hundreds of years ago, and ugliness means … whatever was not created hundreds of years ago.
Later, the author of the essay describes the following as an example of the first quote:
“I was driving to the prison to attend to a prisoner. It was a hot day, and my car window was open. I was playing Chopin, not very loudly, on my car radio. It was an area in which the rap music from passing cars is often apprehended first by pedestrians as a vibration coming up from the ground into their legs. I stopped at some traffic lights, and a man passing approached me and, his face contorted with rage and hatred, shouted at me, “What have you got that shit on for?”"
He (the author) has absolutely no awareness of how he looks to the person shouting at him — of his context in the whole picture. Paternalistic, patronizing, condescending … what a load of crap! The article is from The New Criterion. It’s called “At the forest’s edge“ and it’s by Anthony Daniels.
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Another article from The New Criterion, “Man is wolf to wolf” by John Derbyshire is wonderfully entertaining. The author is not a greenie; quite the contrary:
“An innate, unprompted interest in the natural world is, like other aspects of the individual human personality, strong in many, weak in many others, intense in a few, utterly absent in a few. I would place myself at the lower end of the scale, along with Dorothy Parker (“Every year, back spring comes, with the nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off, and the ground all mucked up with arbutus”)”
Nevertheless, he ends up (after a lot of well-deserved criticism) liking the book that is being reviewed, “American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau“. He ends his review with a quote from Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac“:
“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”
I consider myself to be an environmentalist and a nature lover, but I think an awful lot of current nature/green writing is way over the top. I thoroughly enjoyed this writer’s balloon-popping romp through the genre.
-Julie
