North Shore, Mergansers, and Milosz

In a recent essay in the New York Times, Megan Craig, a professor of philosophy at an East Coast university, laments the fact that her profession doesn't entail  "more calisthenics, rugged walking, running outdoors." Perhaps for a professor of philosophy such activities are not required, and might be difficult to squeeze into the daily campus grind, but an academic in her field ought to be aware that genuine philosophers since the time of Aristotle, widely known in his time and for a millennia afterward as the Peripatetic, have associated thinking with walking, and more generally with being outdoors.

Though I'm not much of a philosopher myself, when Hilary and I head north, as we did a few weeks ago, I load my bookbag with the kind of esoteric reading matter that can only be absorbed bit by bit in an environment free of distractions. On our recent five-day "retreat" on Lake Superior, I brought along The Mirror of Ideas, by Michel Tournier; The English Mind: studies in the English Moralists; Philosophy, Writing and the Character of Thought by John T. Lysaker; Connections to the World by Arthur Danto; Heidegger's Hidden Asian Sources by Reinhard May; Nietzsche, Life as Literature, by Alexander Nehamas, and four or five other books of a similar ilk.

I didn't look at any of them. The weather was too fine. But it was nice to have them near at hand, in case I felt the urge to develop a clearer understanding of why joy tends to leap from my heart when the gulls are keening, the sun is bright but softened by a slight morning haze, there's dew on the grass, and the temperature hovers near 60 degrees.

It was a cold wet spring on the North Shore. Ask anyone. By the time w arrived, the sun had reappeared and the hiking trails were lined with lush plant life. I haven't seen so many bunchberries and bluebells in bloom for decades. Then again, we haven't come to the North Shore at this time of year for quite a while. Pale yellow clintonia were blooming in profusion, and also the delicate white flowers of the serviceberry trees.

The non-flowering vegetation was hardly less appealing: native honeysuckle, sarsaparilla, nameless ferns, little strawberries two inches high and alder shrubs twenty feet high. Hiking around Larsen Lake at Crosby-Manitou State Park we came upon quite a few infant mountain ash, may six or eight feet high, and also some rich carpets of club moss.

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Intoxicated by the plant life, yet I did turn my attention occasionally to one of the books I'd brought: The Land of Ulro by Czeslaw Milosz. I was under the impression that Ulro was somewhere in Lithuania. Turns out it's an invention of Wiliam Blake. Looking it up just now on line, I read:

Ulro is the land of the living dead, the realm of the ghostly and the spectral. It is the land of idols, delusions, and abstractions mistaken as primary realities.

In the course of this longish book, Milosz spends an inordinate amount of time analyzing the imaginary worlds created by three writers who don't interest me much: Witold Gombrowitz, Adam Mickiewicz, and Theodore Swedenborg. Yet I kept reading, and was actually enjoying the journey. Here's a typical passage:

How to explain an extreme pessimism coupled with ecstatic praise, with hymns of ecstasy. Who knows whether this contradiction, so full of import, does not constitute the proper theme of this book. At any rate, I have always been hostile to the "dark" tradition of 20th century literature; its mockery, sarcasms, and profanations have seemed cheap to me when compared to the power of Evil that is within every man's grasp. (p. 38)

If that seems pretty grim, how about this:

For some, reading and writing are a passion. The Way, in the sense in which the word is used by the Taoists ... There is a species of people who feel the compulsion more than others, people for whom reality is too painful as long as it remains anarchic, untrappable, and who feel continually obliged to give it order, a language. (p. 46)

And how about those people who feel the urge to write because they consider reality not painful but mesmerizing, staggering—at least some of the time; who find in it an order that has nothing to do with words, or with them, but arises from the earth unbidden and pursues a harmless and attractive agenda?

Wasn't it Gombrowitz himself, Milosz's alter ego, almost, who wrote: "If literature generally dares to speak, it is not at all because it is certain of its truth, but only because it is certain of its delight"?

Such experiences are difficult to capture in words. They tend to sound fatuous, Pollyannaish, or commonplace. Example. For two days we watched a red-breasted merganser zigzagging back and forth across the bay, head under the water, looking for fish. On the third morning, in the sharp clear light, a merganser paddled by—it might have been the same one—with eight chicks trailing close behind, each of them about the size of a lemon. Half of them looked to be actually sitting on mama's back.

A few minutes later, a gull started keening, and a second one replied from a hundred yards up the shore. Not so haunting as a chorus of loons, but still redolent of shipwrecks, bad weather, and lonely walks on the beach.

The water here is utterly clear to a depth of thirty feet at last. A blanket of stones covers the bottom; a few feet from shore, most of them are the size of a golf ball or a small, misshapen potato. Invariably fine-grained and smooth, they're a hodge-podge of pale blues, reds, and tans, and the honeyed glow and slight distortions created by the water above them adds to the charm. 

But charm isn't the right word. We're talking about something elemental here.

Nothing beyond it. No meaning in it.

At one point Milosz writes:

There is in Pascal a kind of Manichean distrust of nature and the things of "this world" which has made him a hero in the eyes of the pessimists, of those who later, in an era proclaiming the intrinsic good of the "nobler savage," responded with a mordant irony. Pascal's defense of Christianity is thus waged in anthropocentric terms, asserting the "anti-naturalness of that unique phenomenon call consciousness.

Milosz makes it clear that he shares that distrust. Not me.