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Show 346. There are two unavoidable paradoxes here. First, it troubles me to think that the only person who could appreciate scenery is the individual most alienated from Nature. Typically the nineteenth century champion of tourism seemed tied to the assumption that only the civilized man was capable of appreciating Nature. It is the twentieth century ecologist who tells us that the primitive's "life is so profoundly in transaction with nature that there is no place for abstractions or esthetics or a 'nature philosophy' which can be separated from the rest of his life." The second paradox is more troubling. If the urban dweller is in danger of losing his sanity, then there is something wrong with urban life which must be remedied, rather than put off by a temporary therapy which takes him out of his city and then returns him to it. Why use the wilderness to save the insane system which works to destroy Nature? Why feed the monster? Muir had reason to suspect the idea that only civilized men could appreciate the power of scenery, and had attacked the idea when he read it in Ruskin's "Mountain Gloom." We must not dwell in contact with Nature, he tells us, else we will become blind to her beauty, which is the vulgar gross old heresy that familiarity with God will produce contempt of him. He would have us take beauty as we do roast beef or medicine. . . • He clearly disapproved of Ruskin's distant appraisal of Nature, hut he was still willing to argue, with Olmsted, that scenery could be taken as a kind of medicine. |
