from The Country of Language (Scott Russell Sanders)

March 29, 2008

from "Looking"

We treat with care what we love, and we love only what we have truly learned to see, with all our senses alert.

from "Hunger for Books"

Like sunshine, like the urgency of spring, like bread, language is so familiar that we easily forget what an amazing gift it is.

[...]

I’m not foolish enough to believe that books will survive merely because I love them, or because I write them, or because they’ve shaped my life. By comparison with films or videos or computer bulletin boards, a good book requires more from us in the way of intelligence and imagination and memory, and that makes it vulnerable to its glitzy competitors; but a book also rewards us more abundantly. The best books invite us to share in a sustained, complex, subtle effort to make sense of things, to understand some portion of our humanity and our universe. As long as there are people hungry for such understanding, there will be people hungry for books. My own hunger set in long before I could read, back when ink marks on the page were still an impenetrable mystery, and yet even now, after devouring so many thousands of books, I am as ravenous as ever.

from "Garden"

No heavenly angels plucking harps could have played more beautifully than this river stroking stone. I soaked in the sound. And yet every few minutes I realized that I’d stopped hearing it, and then I would look up, see the roiling foam, open my ears once more, and there it was, the roar of the falls. The river kept offering its gift whether or not I was paying attention. To hear it steadily, without any wavering of pleasure or gratitude, would be perfect mindfulness, full awakening.

[...]

What is that attunement of self and world if not an intimation of paradise? I have felt it often, not only in the presence of moving water or ghostly moths or nervous deer, but also in shimmering trees, in meadows of stars, in grasses swept by wind, in a chorus of crickets; and not only in meetings with nonhuman nature, but also in passages of music and poetry, in the elegant findings of science, in the sharing of food and talk with people I love; I have felt it indoors and out, in company or in solitude.

If what I glimpse in those moments is paradise, the fulfillment of my constant hungering for wholeness, then paradise is all around us all the time, had we but eyes to see. It is as though most of the time we grow numb to the splendors of our dwelling place, as my ears grew accustomed to the exquisite ruckus of the Gihon River, and only occasionally do we come awake to behold what is truly and always here. This is one of my deepest and oldest intuitions, that one current courses through all things. I sensed this permeating presence before I learned any religious language to speak of it, and I sense it still, after I have grown weary of all the names for God.

from "Grief"

I confess to ignorance on many grounds, but not ignorance of grief. The grief I know is only in small part my own, because I’ve been spared the worst thus far, but I’ve seen every manner of suffering in neighbors’ houses, I’ve seen hatred up close, I’ve seen bruises and squalor and waste. I’ve known addicts and alcoholics, suicides, deserters and those they deserted, and the victims of slow, wasting disease. I’ve also lived through more than half of this violent century, and ever since I learned to read or to follow grown-up talk I’ve felt in my bones the relentless chronicle of poverty, hunger, racial strife, murder, theft, abuse of women and children, epidemics, war. I would never mistake the world we’ve made for utopia. I would not pretend that nature is nice. The wilderness I knew as a boy is laced with poison and sown with bombs.

No matter how much I write about the possibility of peace and commitment and love, I bear in mind the threat of cruelty, the certainty of pain and loss. I never forget that we have been kicked out of Eden, that we must labor to fill our bellies and to bring forth our young, and that every living thing must die. So I write always in the face of grief. I write about hope because I wrestle with despair. I describe glimpses of paradise as a measure of what we might aspire to and of the direction we might go to. To write about the natural order that sustains us is not to ignore the human condition, but to insist on our most fundamental needs– for light and earth and water and air, for companions, for beauty, meaning and grace.

[...]

… as I came to recognize the tyranny of equations, I became wary of science the same way I had become wary of religion.

There’s no philosophical or emotional difficulty in loving both the contrivances of wildness and the contrivances of mind, but there is a practical one. The more cargo jets fill the sky, the fewer the butterflies; the more garbage trucks, the fewer herons. The more we thoroughly dominate the planet, with our technology and our numbers, the less freedom there is for other creatures to flourish. If we spend enough time in air-conditioned rooms listening to our own voices or watching electrons dance on screens, we might easily suppose that nature is now our captive, our dependent, framed by our purposes, as that butterfly was framed by the airport window. But that would be a dangerous illusion. No matter how many fences we build, no matter how many lines or numbers we draw on maps, no matter how much concrete we pour or chemicals we spray, we are not in charge and never will be. We are the guests of a great and mysterious power. That power, in all of its myriad manifestations, is my abiding subject. In writing about nature, I am not turning my back on society; I am seeking to place our small, brief lives within the vast encompassing order on which our every breath depends.

–Scott Russell Sanders
from The Country of Language

Tags: essays, readings, scott russell sanders