Explication

4.

Does wilderness, in the isolated form that Haines depends on, even really exist? Does emptiness? Richardson wasn’t empty when he arrived. It just looked empty to him.

Haines wasn’t alone much of the time at Richardson. He acknowledged it, writing, “There is one part of it I have hardly mentioned and that concerns the two women who lived there much of the time, and one in particular.” The vaguest of mention, no names, no description.

And even in his constructed “aloneness” he courted an epistolary relationship with very famous poets Outside who became the champions of his work.

My painter friend, Kes, told me, You have a problem with nature writing. And yes, I do. Writing that posits the single self in the wilderness as the key to enlightenment irritates me. We aren’t trapped into solitary pursuit of the “older consciousness.” There must be other passages between “the lines between human and animal” that don’t depend on transplanting oneself onto a faux-empty land.

Other passages. No one is ever actually alone.