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them with significance. It is labour that transforms Nature into meaning. And this always
involves a degree of violence. Body and soul are both subject to belligerent onslaughts,
along with rain forests and terrorist strongholds.
A lot of the West's running, carving, slimming, stitching, puking and weight-pumping
represents a fantasy of omnipotence, but also of immortality. It betrays a deep-seated hostil-
ity to the body, over which the immortal will must assert its sway. Because it is fragile, the
body must be nurtured tenderly, yet it is just this fragility that makes you feel so squeamish
about it. In the end, however, Nature always has the upper hand over culture. This victory
is known as death. Death cannot be mastered, and is thus bound to be something of an in-
dignity for those who wish the world to be magically responsive to their touch. There is
nothing you can do with it. A corpse is just a lump of meaningless matter. Its meaning has
haemorrhaged away.
Tragedy is the wager that you can make something out of this dissolution, plucking value
from loss and breakdown. You can do so, however, only by staring these things squarely in
the face. Only by submitting to their power can you transcend them. It is this that America
finds hard to accept. In this as in other ways, it is a profoundly anti-tragic civilisation. On
the whole, it rejects the belief, common to both St. Paul and Martin Heidegger, that you can
make something of your life only by making something of your death.
Before the pioneers set out on their civilising mission, there was, so they imagined,
simply wilderness. This wilderness was not entirely real, because it was yet to have mean-
ing stamped upon it by the human will. Even so, America has always been nostalgic for
this condition. In a world in which everything bears the indelible impress of Man, it is re-
freshing to escape from time to time from this wall-to-wall humanisation. Hence the Amer-
ican enthusiasm for national parks and outdoor activities. It is seductive to see the world as
though we were not there to see it. We can always dream of perceiving things as they are
in themselves, without the buzz and distortion of human meaning. We can take a vacation
now and then from the intolerable burden of sense-making, rather as we do when we treat
human flesh as something to be mindlessly indulged. We can shuck off language and con-
front reality in the raw, as we imagine an innocent child might do.
Man is what brings Nature to perfection, but he is also an intruder there. There is a strong
streak of such primitivism in American culture. It is all the stronger because the wilderness
was not that long ago, and because it still flourishes in the sublime rivers and mountain
ranges of the country. It is worth adding, however, that though Nature in the United States
is more dramatic and spectacular than most of the British countryside, it is not what one
would call charming, as Cornish villages and the Yorkshire Dales are charming. Charm is
more of a European quality than an American one. It is hard to be charming on a large
scale, not least in a country where individual states dwarf entire European countries.
Yet there was also something ominous about this untamed landscape. It could be a place
for spiritual reflection, or a refuge from a wicked world; but it was also an image of the
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