Mountain Retreat

ἐντὶ δάφναι τηνεί, ἐντὶ ῥαδιναὶ κυπάρισσοι,
ἔστι μέλας κισσός, ἔστ᾽ ἄμπελος ἁ γλυκύκαρπος,
ἔστι ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ, τό μοι ἁ πολυδένδρεος Αἴτνα
λευκᾶς ἐκ χιόνος ποτὸν ἀμβρόσιον προΐητι.
τίς κα τῶνδε θάλασσαν ἔχειν καὶ κύμαθ᾽ ἕλοιτο;

There are laurel trees, and slender cypresses,
there is dark ivy, and the sweet-fruited vine,
there is cool water, which tree-abounding Aetna
sends forth as an ambrosial draught from her snowy heights.
Who would choose the sea and its waves over these?

Theocritus, Idyl. XI.45-49. My translation.

Nature's Revenge

There is a tractor that is kept by the Xiang river for the purpose of tearing up the reeds and vines that grow to cover the mudflats ever summer. This Autumn, the vines are engaged in a futile effort to subdue the machine.

People

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake (New York: Scribner, 2024), loc.1189-1190:

Nature doesn’t bother me. What bothers me in nature is the possibility of people. I get a feeling in woods, no matter how remote they are, that someone could be around.

Endless Spring on Yuelu Mountain

玉洞仙壇長冷落，真墟岩竇色常新。
可憐城里悠悠者，不識瀟湘四季春。

The Xian altar in the jade cave has long been left desolate,
The Zhenxu rock cave is always a fresh sight.
I pity those who spend their time in the city,
They do not know the endless spring of Hunan.

Notes:
This poem is from the "Nanyue Zongsheng Collection" (南嶽總勝集) by Chen Tianfu of the Song Dynasty.

Xian: can refer to any immortal in Taoism/Chinese folklore.

Zhenxu: a grotto on Yuelu Mountain: 洞真墟福地.

The anonymous poet complains about the neglect of the sacred places on Yuelu Mountain and pities those who spend too much time in the city.

全唐詩續拾卷五十六 [Complete Tang Dynasty Poems], Volume 56, poem 174. Chinese Texts Project. My translation.

Nature Will Try Anything Once

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2011; 1974), p. 66.

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you’re dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; there’s always room for one more; you ain’t so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.

Insects and Rain

Local sayings:

蜻蜓低飞要下雨。
When dragonflies fly low, it will rain.

蚂蚁搬家要下雨。
When ants move their nests, it will rain.

My translations.

Now-you-see-it

Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves. These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don't-see-it, now-you-do.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2011; 1974), p. 18.

Grasshoppers and Snails

οἱ τέττιγες μουσικοί, οἱ δὲ κοχλίαι ἄφωνοι· χαίρουσι δὲ οἱ μὲν ὑγραινόμενοι, οἱ δὲ ἀλεαινόμενοι· ἔπειτα προκαλεῖται τοὺς μὲν ἡ δρόσος καὶ ἐπὶ ταύτῃ ἐκδύνουσι, τοὺς δ᾽ αὖ διεγείρει ἀκμάζων ὁ ἥλιος καὶ ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ ᾁδουσι. τοιγαροῦν εἰ βούλει μουσικὸς καὶ εὐάρμοστος ὑπάρχειν ἀνήρ, ἡνίκ᾽ ἂν ἐν τοῖς πότοις ὑπὸ τοῦ οἴνου δροσισθῇ ἡ ψυχή, τότε αὐτὴν μὴ ἔα προιοῦσαν μολύνεσθαι· ἀλλ᾽ ἡνίκ᾽ ἂν ἐν τοῖς συνεδρίοις ὑπὸ τοῦ λόγου διαπυρωθῇ, τότε θεσπίζειν καὶ ᾁδειν τὰ τῆς δικαιοσύνης κέλευε λόγια.

Grasshoppers are musical; snails are voiceless: the latter take delight in being wet and the former in being warm. Thereafter, the dew calls the snails to crawl out, while on the contrary the sun at its height rouses the grasshoppers to sing. Accordingly, if you wish to be a musical and harmonius person, when bedewed with wine at drinking-bouts, do not allow one’s soul to go forth and be polluted; but when in gatherings of reason, then bid her speak from inspiration and sing oracles of justice.

Epitectus, Fragment 26. My translation.

Nature and the Book

 In Australia, nature and the book existed in a state of war. Summer damp and heat reacted with the bleach in paper to produce ‘foxing’; an apparently pristine book could be marred on every page by its rusty blotches. A few of Sydney’s arrogant varnish-brown cockroaches were likely to scuttle out of any carton you started to excavate, but other bugs were more insidious. Some could drill a perfect millimetre-wide tunnel through the heftiest tome. Others confined themselves to the surface. When a publisher coated his covers with the wrong sort of ‘size’, bugs headed for them in the millions, slithering under the dust wrapper to browse until the boards were covered with winding white tracks. Certain books were notorious for this fault. In a shelf devoted to works by Randolph Stow, insects always singled out his collection of poems, A Counterfeit Silence. ‘It was bound in a turquoise cloth that was sized with gelatine,’ remembers Sydney bookseller Nicholas Pounder. ‘Once a critical humidity was achieved, it was like aniseed to a hound; the silverfish and cockies would scamper, slavering.’ But people could do far worse damage than any insect. Annotations, underlinings and marginalia were common, the reader carrying on an exasperated conversation with the writer. A scribbled ‘Fool!’ in the margin was common, as was ‘Yes!’ or ‘No!’, with the occasional ‘So true!’ Obviously they never expected anybody else to read these books, since, even when they wrote ‘False’, they never explained why it was false.

John Baxter, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict (New York : Thomas Dunne, 2003; 2002) , p. 87.

Vergil and Nature

 Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature. Indeed, the best books have a use, like sticks and stones, which is above or beside their design, not anticipated in the preface, nor concluded in the appendix. Even Virgil's poetry serves a very different use to me to-day from what it did to his contemporaries. It has often an acquired and accidental value merely, proving that man is still man in the world. It is pleasant to meet with such still lines as,

    “Jam laeto turgent in palmite gemmae;”
     Now the buds swell on the joyful stem.
or
    “Strata jacent passim sua quaeque sub arbore poma.”
     The apples lie scattered everywhere, each under its tree.

In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York: Bantam, 2004), p. 66 [A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849].

Nam tantus philosophus, et Platonis, in quo summa eloquentia summae sapientiae coniuncta est, optimus imitator, P. Vergilii eloquentiam naturae omnium rerum optimae parenti similem esse docet. Nam ut terram hic frugibus arboribusque laetam videmus, ibi pratis floribusque omnia ridere, aliam regionem fontibus irrigari, aliam omnino arescere, esse et loca quae in campos porrigantur, esse et alia quae in montes rupesque consurgant, eosdemque alibi horrendis sylvis vestiri, alibi nudo saxo inhorrescere; sic P. Vergilius stilum suum ad omnes vitae mores integrum traducit, ut nunc brevis nunc copiosus sit, nunc siccum nunc floridum sese ostendat, est praeterea ubi levi fluat agmine, est et cum veluti per confragosa torrens rapidusque praecipitetur.

For that great philosopher [Macrobius], in whom the greatest eloquence is combined with wisdom, is the best imitator of Plato; he teaches that the eloquence of Virgil is akin to the greatest parent of everything of nature. For we see in one place the earth fertile with crops and trees, and in another place, everything rejoices in meadows and flowers. We see another region watered by springs, and another region dried up. We see lands where fields stretch wide, and lands where with rising cliffs and mountains. Elsewhere, we see countries clothed in bristling forests, and countries trembling on barren rock. Though these scenes, Virgil conveys with his vigorous style each manner of life, so that it is now scare, now plentiful; he himself shows what is now desert, and what is now blooming with life, where there is a river flowing in a gentle stream, and where it rushes down over the rough landscape, roaring and rapid.

Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498), Scritti critici e teorici, ed. by Roberto Cardini, 2 vols (Rome: Bulzone, 1974), I, p. 215 [Proemio al commento Virgiliano, 1488]. My translation.

A Great Impersonal Order

 Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1964; 1940), p. 53:

The animal world is a great impersonal order, without pathos in its suffering. Man is bound to it by necessity and guilt, and by the closer bond of life, for he breathes the same breath. But when man is swallowed up in nature nature is corrupted and man is corrupted. The sense of corruption in King Lear comes from the fact that Goneril, Regan and Cornwall are merely animals furnished with human faculties as with weapons which they can take up or lay down at will, faculties which they have stolen, not inherited. Words are their teeth and claws, and thought the technique of the deadly spring. They are so unnatural in belonging completely to nature that Gloucester can explain them only by "these late eclipses in the sun and moon." In King Lear nature is monstrous because man has been swallowed up in it:

A serving-man, proud in heart and mind; that curled my hair; wore gloves in my cap; served the lust of my mistress' heart and did the act of darkness with her; swore as many oaths as I spake words and broke them in the sweet face of heaven: one that slept in the contriving of lust and waked to do it: wine loved I deeply, dice dearly, and in woman out-paramoured the Turk: false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey.

That is a picture of an animal with human faculties, made corrupt and legendary by the proudly curled hair. The conflict in Lear is a conflict between the sacred tradition of human society, which is old, and nature, which is always new, for it has no background. As I sat in that tramcar in Glasgow I was in an unhistorical world; I was outside time without being in eternity; in the small, sensual, momentary world of a beast.

Sunlight

Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature. Mother Earth looks at us with such dull, soulless eyes, when the sunlight has died away from out of her. It makes us sad to be with her then; she does not seem to know us or to care for us. She is as a widow who has lost the husband she loved, and her children touch her hand, and look up into her eyes, but gain no smile from her.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (London: Collins Classics, 2013; 1889), p. 205.

A Head in the Forest

Almost every tree on Yuelu Mountain was affected by our unusually severe winter. In some places the majority of trees all but destroyed. One strange occurrence is that the uprooting of one camphor tree revealed this stone head with old-fashioned glasses: for whatever reason was formerly buried on the mountain-side.

There are Always New Beauties in Nature, Every Day

Though I have now travelled the Sussex Downs upwards of thirty years, yet I still investigate that chain of majestic mountains with fresh admiration year by year: and I think I see new beauties every time I traverse it.

Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selbourne (London: Penguin Books, 1987; 1788-89), p. 152.

Divine Splendour in Creation

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), Commentaire sur le Banquet de Platon = Commentarium in convivium Platonis, De amore, ed. & trans. by Pierre Laurens (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002), p. 37 [II.5]:

Quemadmodum uero solis radius unus corpora quatuor, ignem, aerem, aquam terramque illustrat, sic unus dei radius mentem, animam, naturam, materiamque illuminat. Atque ut in quatuor iis elementis quicumque lumen inspicit, solis ipsius aspicit radium, perque ipsum ad supernam solis lucem intuendam conuertitur. Ita quisquis decorem in quatuor istis, mente, anima, natura, corpore contemplatur amatque, dei fulgorem in iis, perque fulgorem huiusmodi, deum ipsum intuetur et amat.

Just as one single ray of the sun illuminates the four bodies: fire, air, water and earth, so a single ray of God illuminates the mind, the soul, nature and matter. And just as anyone who looks at the light in those four elements, looks at a ray of the sun itself, and through that same ray is turned to looking at the celestial light of the sun, so it is that anyone who observes and loves the beauty in those four: mind, soul, nature and body, sees and loves the splendour of God in them, and through that splendour, sees and loves God Himself.

My translation.

Contemplating an Empty Universe

From George Berkeley’s (1685-1753) Commonplace Book, in The Works of George Berkeley D.D., Formerly Bishop of Cloyne: Including His Posthumous Works, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), I, p. 59:

’Tis wondrous to contemplate y^e World empty’d of all intelligences.

Wicken Fen

Nick Davies, Cuckoo: Cheating by Nature (London: Bloomsbury, 2016; 2015), p. 50:

When Nature managed the fens, there was plenty of suitable habitat for reed warblers and cuckoos. Now we are in charge, their future is in our hands. If we want reed warblers and cuckoos in our landscape we'll have to manage the land and pay for them, just as we do for our agricultural crops.