Monoscapes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 48

town to live by Walden Pond in the forests of Massachusetts. 50 For 26
months, he repossessed his own nature. In his account of life in the forest,
he compared his views with those still in the town, and explored the nature
of civilization, the economic exploitation of nature, the simple life, and
the distinct sounds and deep solitude. His is the celebration of nature as
a special place, not as a strictly untouched wilderness: 'I went to the woods
because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could
not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.'
His contemplation changed him:
Sometimes, in a summer morning. . . I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise
till noon, rapt in a reverie amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs. In undisturbed
solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiselessly through the
house. . . I grew in those seasons like corn in the night.
He discovers an intimacy with nature through such close observation, and
through farming his bean field: 'consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one
makes with various kinds of weeds' .
The real insight in Thoreau's writing is the journey he himself travels,
and his vision and willingness to experiment, and his desire to make his
words meaningful to other people in the cities to whom he does, of course,
return. 'I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the
direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet
with a success unexpected in common hours' . His concern is with how we live our
lives, each of us, and how this can be improved through a closer relation
with nature. More than a century later, wildness writer Barry Lopez makes
a similar connection: 'As I travelled, I came to believe that people's desires and aspirations
were as much a part of the land as the wind, solitary animals, and the bright fields of stone
and tundra.' 51
Such pride in your own landscape is common the world over. David
Arnold quotes the renowned Bengali poet and novelist Rabindranath
Tagore who, writing in 1894, said:
Many people dismiss Bengal for being so flat, but for me the fields and rivers are
sights to love. With the falling of evening the vault of the sky brims with tranquillity
like a goblet of lapis lazuli, while the immobility of afternoon reminds me of the
border of a golden sari wrapped around the whole world. Where is there another
land to fill the mind so?
But Tagore also knew of another painful truth, and he rightly points to
the combined social and ecological challenge: 'every house has rheumatism,
swollen legs, colds or fevers, or a malaria-ridden child ceaselessly crying [whom] no one
can save'. 52