Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch

The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch
New York: Pocket Books, 1970.

Began to write about nature with the thought of spreading Joy about living. Nature and living are unpredictable and therefore mysterious. Life will outlive man. The more man thinks about nature in terms of generalizations and abstractions, the less he will participate in nature. We are taught to trust less and less the evidence of the five senses. Understanding by abstractions, generalizations and statistics is substituted for experience. The society of living things is an anarchy in which everything works against everything else. To the frog, man serves no useful purpose. Red and green are primary colors in nature, the red of blood and the green of chlorophyll.

Most insects never see their children; in fact, they are dead before their children hatch. Tennyson: nature cares about the type, not the single individual.

Winter is winter even in the desert.

" 'Adjustment,' a defeatist sort of word suggesting dismal surrender...." "To be an animal is to be capable of ingenuity and of joy; of achieving beauty and demonstrating affection." "If we have thoughts and feelings, it seems at least probable that something analogous exists in those from whom we are descended." "From those ducks in their time I got many lessons in gladness...."

"[Frogs] are the perfect embodiment of frogginess both outwardly and inwardly, so that nearly every individual achieves, as very few humans do, what the Greeks would have called his entelechy--the complete realization of the possibilities which he suggests." "I am not convinced that the animal mind is as nearly a mere set of reflexes as the behaviorists confidently assert." Animals may not understand words, but they understand the emotions with which they are expressed, many shades of emotion. The individuality of animals.

"The killer for sport prefers death to life, darkness to light; he gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying, 'Something which wanted to live is dead; there is that much less vitality, consciousness, and perhaps, joy in the universe; I am the spirit that denies.' " "When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man, we call him a vandal; when he destroys one of the works of God, we call him a sportsman." Havelock Ellis: "The sun, moon and stars would have disappeared long ago if they had happened to be within reach of predatory human hands." "Unfortunately, the scientific study of living creatures does not always promote either reverence or love...." "Biology as commonly taught is not a humane subject; it is simply an elementary preparation for the trade of the specialist." We are taught to dissect the lower animals but don't study them as living beings." "Instead of increasing empathy, it [biology] destroys it; instead of enlarging our sympathy, it hardens the heart."

"Nothing the lesser creatures can teach us is more worth learning than the lesson of gladness." If they don't sing, they play. "The gift for happiness is not always in proportion to intelligence." Seeking pleasure is a compensation for the joy we seldom feel. "According to a theory at least as old as Immanuel Kant, a purely aesthetic experience is possible only in the presence of something which provokes no reaction other than contemplation."

[In response to Monument Valley]: "Statistics mean little because the imagination does not take them in."

Compare the Panama Canal to the Grand Canyon's Colorado River. "Nature is that part of the world which man did not make and which has not been fundamentally changed by him; it is the mountains, the woods, the rivers, the trees, the plants, and the animals which have continued to be very much what they would have been had he never existed."

"Darwinism generated a romanticism in reverse in which all is conflict, violence, and blood; the fact is that animals do not spend all their time fighting for survival." " 'Evolution' implies the growing complexity of things previously existing in simpler form." "We face back to our primitive ancestors, perhaps even to the ape, but we also look forward to we know not what."

The modern physicist accepts the paradoxes of his science because, "What other explanation is possible?""The intellectual history of Western man is often summed up as consisting of the various stages of his disillusion with the assumption that the world was made for him; that he is the most important thing in it; that it has a humanly understandable meaning and purpose; that all evil is good not understood." The moth and the intricate method of fertilizing the flower. How was such a system of mutual interdependence set up?

Nature loves the race; man loves the individual.

Life is rebellious and anarchical, always testing the supposed immutability of the rules the nonliving changelessly accept. The snowflake always follows the rule of six; the planets travel always in an ellipse; the astronomer can tell where the North Star will be ten thousand years hence; the botanist cannot tell where the dandelion will bloom tomorrow. The frost flower is not merely a wonder; it is also a threat and a warning; could human life surrender to fixed laws and become inanimate? Is our dependence on technology hastening our change into inanimacy?

Summary and Reflections: In a world of scientific abstractions, anatomizing, statistics and mathematical formulas to describe reality, Krutch champions the return to the five senses in appreciating and understanding nature. We do not appreciate the other living things on our planet, supposing that man is dominant over all things in nature. But nature can do things that man cannot even approach. Compare the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon and man's masterpiece, the Panama Canal. Is technology hastening our subjecting ourselves to becoming comfortable in the thoughtless intricacies of the inanimate? Are humans headed toward becoming another form of the frost flower? Krutch tries to awaken in us our sense of wonder at the miracle of nature and living things.