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Show 256. There was no heroism in Fall's shooting, nor was Muir's attitude quaint. If there was a snake in the Garden, it was there for reasons that men were not likely to understand. If men were capable of appreciating Nature, they would have to accept, first of all, her own ways, which included alligators, tarantulas, and rattlesnakes. THE EVIL IN NATURE How could a man place his trust in Darwin's Nature? What if Nature was not so benevolent as men had always hoped? This was a source of tremendous uncertainty. Emerson was very little help, finally, because his version of Nature was so much a mirror of the poet's mind. As his colleagues in Concord knew, Emerson frequently saw himself when he looked at Nature. It was no longer possible to believe things were so simple in the more complex version of the cosmos that Darwin proposed. Herman Melville had travelled further from Concord than Emerson, and that had only made him less sure of the benevolence of the creation. When he considered the Galapagos, he was appalled not only because they suggested a diabolical world, but because they also destroyed his faith in Providence. Years later, he seemed a broken man to his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne. [He] informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to |
