I grew up loving Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. My grandmother learn it to me earlier than I might learn. I learn it to myself as quickly as I might. I liked the strangeness of it, and the tenderness. As a baby mathematician, I liked understanding {that a} grown mathematician had written it. However what I most liked concerning the story was Alice’s fearless curiosity and compassion as she encountered all of the creatures populating Wonderland. I liked the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat and Invoice the Lizard as a result of Alice liked them.
That is what makes Wonderland Wonderland: To its denizens, it’s simply their world, mundane as life. “That is water.” What confers surprise upon it for the reader, what makes the story a narrative and never a vignette of peculiar life in an peculiar world, is the view by way of Alice’s wonder-smitten eyes as she strikes by way of it, and surprise is the mightiest catalyst of care.
We care as a result of she cares.
Within the century and a half since Lewis Carroll, a lineage of writers — Richard Jefferies, Henry Beston, Rachel Carson, Robert Macfarlane, Richard Powers — have utilized that methodology to this world, reminding us that we too live in a wonderland, as actual as it’s inconceivable, for nowhere else throughout the inky vastness of spacetime strewn with billions upon billions of different star methods is there one other world lush with life, so far as we but know.
“Nature writing” and “environmental writing” are odd phrases, one intimating that we ourselves should not nature (which Denise Levertov captured poignantly in her poem “Sojourns within the Parallel World”) and the opposite casting nature as one thing that surrounds us, in flip implying our centrality. These writers who’ve gotten humanity to care concerning the pure world — which is the world — have performed so as a result of they themselves have moved by way of it with a way of surprise, every of them an Alice making a Wonderland of Earth.
That is what Jonathan Franzen affirms in a passage from his foreword to Spark Birds (public library) — a beautiful Orion anthology of essays and poems celebrating the surprise of the feathered world, that includes such beloved voices as Mary Oliver, Terry Tempest Williams, and J. Drew Lanham, co-edited by Franzen himself.
With an eye fixed to the essential A-to-B construction of a narrative propelled by a way of goal alongside the axis of its plot, he considers the problem of making a dramatic narrative round creatures whose main goal is fundamental survival, creatures “pushed by needs the alternative of private” and free from “moral ambivalence or remorse” — these marvelous, maddening complexities that make for the human drama. He writes:
Absent heavy-duty anthropomorphizing or projection, a wild animal merely doesn’t have the particularity of self, outlined by its historical past and its needs for the long run, on which good storytelling relies upon. With a wild animal character, there may be solely ever some extent A: the animal is what it’s and was and all the time can be. For there to be some extent B, a vacation spot for a dramatic journey, solely a human character will suffice. Narrative nature writing, at its best, locations an individual (typically the creator, writing within the first individual) in some type of unresolved relationship with the pure world, supplies the character with unanswered questions or an unattained purpose, nevertheless giant or small, after which deploys universally shared feelings — hope, anger, longing, frustration, embarrassment, disappointment — to interact a reader within the journey. If the writing succeeds in heightening a reader’s curiosity within the pure world, it does so not directly.
Rachel Carson — who woke up the fashionable ecological conscience by making of science a magnifying lens for the inherent surprise of the pure world and rendering that surprise within the poetic language of common emotion — conveyed this oblique enchantment in her magnificent Nationwide Ebook Award acceptance speech: “If there may be poetry in my e book concerning the sea,” she stated on the ceremony the place she shared a desk with the poet Marianne Moore, “it’s not as a result of I intentionally put it there, however as a result of nobody might write honestly concerning the sea and miss the poetry.” In consonance with Carson’s credo that “the extra clearly we will focus our consideration on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the much less style we will have for the destruction of our race,” Franzen celebrates the ability of writing with feeling, with surprise, with reverence for all times:
We are able to’t make a reader care about nature. All we will do is inform tales of people that do care, and hope that the caring is contagious.
Complement with marine biologist Andreas Weber on poetic ecology and the biology of surprise, then revisit Rachel Carson on writing.
