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THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION: THOREAU, NATURE WRITING, AND THE FORMATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE, by Lawrence Buell. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995, 586 pp., $35.00,
$16.95 paper
For as long as there has been literature there has been nature writing. We all live in natural environments to one degree or another, and our written accounts of what we do within them are inevitably framed by what we have learned from them. Even the hardened city dweller, absorbed in enterprise and artifacts, becomes aware in furtive aesthetic moments of the brisk wind, the birds, the clouds, the trees and weeds and flowers that penetrate his urban world. It is hardly surprising therefore that writing that aims to show us as we really are so often occupies itself in portraying relations between consciousness and its natural objects. Sense is the father of sensibilities, and our sensibilities are deeply and continuously molded by our experience of the world we didn't make. It is one of modern literature's stunning ironies that the more our cultural settings appear unnatural to us, the more powerfully literary portraits of nature speak to us. Only after the Walden Pond that Thoreau knew had vanished did it hold us in its thrall.
Lawrence Buell's sweeping, magisterial study of literary representations of the natural environment traces the many strands of thought and forms of craft that intertwine in the imagination's ever-evolving engagement with nature. Although Thoreau is the central figure in the account-and Buell's fresh and insightful reading of his work and its literary context takes up a full third of the book-he is presented as the avatar of one tendency of thought that extends before and after him in a myriad of less well-known writings. It is this tendency of thought that becomes the book's most compelling thematic presence. Thoreau wasn't Wordsworth, and he wasn't Muir. He didn't transfigure the natural environment into romantic moral allegory, and he didn't deify its pristine purity. Thoreau's approach to nature combined imagination and practical action in showing his readers a mind transfigured by the very thing it seeks to comprehend and represent. He shows us that, though the spectator may sometimes fancy himself an Emersonian "transparent eyeball" neutrally observing its surroundings, the more he sees the more he becomes...