Late afternoon on a winter’s solstice. To the west, long layers of thin purple clouds stretch and grow like coral reefs in a swimming red sea of light. Right now it seems both pleasant and important just to sit and watch the sunset slowly dissolve like this, to mark a significant moment in the year’s journey and imagine I can feel the earth halt and tilt on its global hinges, and begin the slow upward climb toward summer.
It seems important to do this, because lately I have been abnormally out of touch with natural surroundings. At a recent holiday party a guest informed me that there were six feet of pack ice in Cape Cod Bay. I suddenly realized I had not been down to the shore in weeks. It made me feel as though I had been living in a foreign country, and in a sense I have. ‘Pressing business’ and holiday tasks have led me to spend an unusual amount of time in the confines of cities and the mazes of shopping malls. I have been wandering through wildernesses of aisles, fluorescent forests, and the sluggish deltas of checkout counters. Occasionally I passed a familiar face, but there seemed barely a moment for recognition before we were swept away on separate currents of the season’s errands.
The weeks before Christmas are the time when criticism of our society’s materialism reaches its height. Yet strangely enough, after one of these commercial journeys, I find that I do not feel ‘materialistic,’ but terribly insubstantial. In fact, I have always found it hard to think of Americans as materialists, in the sense of a people addicted to creature comforts, tangible pleasures and objects for their own sakes.
In one way, Americans are the most spiritual of peoples, if by spiritual we mean a stubborn devotion to unseen myths, promised rewards and intangible values. I do not mean by this whatever resurgence of religious heritage we may feel at this time of year, but the abstract and insubstantial nature of most of our daily lives. Our everyday view of the world, for instance, is highly charged and colored with a multitude of electronic images and public opinions – pumped in by the media and the polls -which often have little or nothing to do with our actual, sensual experience of the world.
Most of us, too, live in a financial world where our position is not based on solid, tangible assets, but on a confused and shifting series of bank accounts, bills, mortgages and a vague overriding concept called credit standing – a concept usually defined not so much by figures or dimensions but by weight, namely, the largest burden we can bear.
Not just our present, but our past seems to grow increasingly insubstantial. More and more people possess their childhoods in memory only. Not only have most of us moved away from the scenes and faces of our youth, but the places themselves have disappeared. ‘They’re tearing up the street where I was born,’ is a motif of modern life which we have nearly completely accepted. Neighborhoods are swept away in the name of ‘transportation needs,’ just as forests are bulldozed off in the name of ‘expanding housing pressures’- all in the name of that most elusive and unreal of all our abstract gods, ‘a healthy economy.’
Cape Cod is no different. We age quickly here, too, perhaps more quickly than most places. Speaking of our towns -their populations, roads, landscape, prominent buildings and names – we tend to say, ‘I remember when,’ speaking of a time only one or two years gone, or less. The capacity for human change now rivals, and on the surface surpasses, natural process itself, so that the earth seems to shift under our feet. Land itself becomes little more than abstract patterns on a developer’s plan or the assessor’s map, coordinates for profit or taxes. We can no longer see the forest for the fees. When I pass woods and fields these days, they seem ghostlike and ephemeral, less than real. For all I know (and what I know makes it seem likely) they are already crisscrossed with invisible lot lines and road layouts, merely waiting for a shift in the economic weather to effect their transformation into something utterly different and strange.
Not surprisingly, in the face of such encroaching insubstantiality of contemporary life, we cling to material goods and look to them for salvation from abstraction. Yet what we chase is more often the idea and not the thing itself, glittering wraiths of promises that are themselves more abstractions. We do not buy houses for comfort, fit and convenience – we buy ‘good investments.’ A car salesman sells us power steering, not because we need it, but because it ‘undergoes little depreciation.’ We buy clothes and vacations, not because we like them, but because they are ‘good buys’ or well-advertised.
One would think that at least in our hobbies and leisure pursuits we would seek real pleasure, but even here our choices are often guided by their therapeutic value, or because they are good exercise. As has been said many times, American accumulation of wealth and goods is not so much real as symbolic, not of financial security but of a secure sense of the material world that we so desperately lack.
Our shifting, ephemeral human world also explains, I think, our preoccupation with nature as an ‘escape’ from it. In the natural world we look to find a solid reality, something rooted and fixed that we can stay ourselves on. And yet, when we look closely, we find that nature is no more real than our own culture. It is, in Jacob Bronowski’s phrase, ‘a fugitive universe,’ shifting elusive entities the essence of which, according to quantum physics, seems to be uncertainty.
I know that in these same ranks of trees I pass, whose fate seems to be up for human grabs, their seemingly solid trunks are largely an act of faith. The actual life of a tree is the merest of phantoms, a paper-thin, hollow husk of living cells, ‘as delicate and transparent as a soap bubble,’ as Rutherford Platt puts it. And yet these cellulose husks are continuously transforming a flow of minerals, gases and liquids into new and ingenious forms. As Rachel Carson once wrote, ‘The forest borrows its materials to make temporary but emphatic statements. A tree may die, but never its idea.’ I read the same lesson every time I find a cast-off crab shell, or see the ephemeral and constant flocks of butterflies each summer. It is all a sending on, both man and nature, preoccupied more with form than substance.
It is almost dark now. I look outside my window and see a bare maple, inert and dangling its limbs like a wire sculpture. But the fattened buds at the tips of the twigs hold an unseen promise, not only of a new year but of new worlds, stretching above and below sight. And I think, why should I not follow these promises more than the shaky and vacillating ones of man’s own devising? I look again, and the young tree seems to shimmer and fade in the wind and the dying light, till it darkens to nothing and stars come out between its branches.