Starry Night Over the Rhone, Van Gogh; 188

ALAN writes:

“Nature’s verities offer certainty and tranquility,” Ozark farmer, nature writer, conservationist, and St. Louis newspaper columnist Leonard Hall wrote more than thirty years ago.

There is much truth in those words. Lawrence Auster wrote about the beauty of an autumn day in New York.  Laura Wood has written about the beauty of flowers, the splendor of the night sky, and the astonishing occurrence of a bird knocking at her door.

Those things reminded me of a story told by Louise Dickinson Rich. She lived in the deep woods of Maine and wrote at length about their beauty and challenges. There was a big Russian fellow there who worked as a lumberjack.  He worked alone because he liked it that way and it was said that he was impossible to get along with.  One day while walking through the woods, she saw him sitting alone except for a group of chickadees that surrounded him.  She wrote:

“Moving very slowly and patiently, he was crumbling the bread and cookies from his lunch pail and scattering them in an ever-narrowing circle; and the surly face was gentle and almost yearning.  As I watched from the sheltering woods, first one, then another, then a whole cluster of chickadees lighted on his arms and shoulders, pert and pretty in their little black caps and bibs.  The Russian smiled, a sunny smile of pure delight, and was transfigured.

I went away as quietly as I could….  Never again could he seem to me brutish and insensible.  I’d seen him wreathed in a garland of tiny birds, and it was not a sight I could forget….”  [The Natural World of Louise Dickinson Rich; Dodd, Mead, 1962, pp. 94-95]

I can imagine how he felt.  A man does not become a curmudgeon for no good reason. Perhaps he was sick and tired of dealing with pretenders, parasites, connivers, moochers, opportunists, do-gooders, excuse-makers, and excuse validators – and grateful for the simple, forthright integrity of small animals who asked nothing of him.  I, too, have “had it up to here” with most human beings.  Long, long ago, when I was young and naïve, I half expected to grow up and live the duration of my life among reasonable human beings.  Boy, was I wrong. I have seen the stupid and inexcusable things those “reasonable” human beings have done or permitted to be done to this nation in what surely must rank as one of the most astounding examples of national and cultural suicide in all history.  With such people for our countrymen, we do not need enemies.  I would sooner choose the company of birds or cats than that of most human beings, because I know that birds and cats will never pretend to be anything they aren’t. They will not betray, nor will the stars or the flowers.

In Country Year (1956), Mr. Hall wrote “…we forget that while civilization is improving our houses, it does a far poorer job of improving the human beings who inhabit them…”

He and his wife chose to live on a farm in the Missouri Ozarks because of their love of nature and the outdoors.  In doing so, he wrote, they “were getting an extra dividend on the purchase price in the way of bird songs, flowing springs, and beautiful sunsets.”  He had no sympathy for “the worship of bigness for its own sake and of gadgetry as an end in itself, which seems an inseparable part of American city living…”

Imagine what he would say about Americans today who never pause to admire the sight or songs of birds, or the ever-changing play of light upon the clouds, or a solar halo or lunar halo, or a double rainbow, or the night sky, or a conjunction of planets, or the intricacy of the gossamer creations of a backyard spider, or clouds of ballooning spiders in October – all there, just for the looking, because they cannot separate themselves from their modern gadgets and toys.

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone,” said Thoreau, one of the men Mr. Hall most admired.  By that measure, both of them were wealthy men, as are the Amish people today.  But cool Americans have modified that remark to read:  “We are rich in proportion to the number of things, toys, gadgets, and games that we cannot afford to let alone.”  Then they prove it by building bigger houses and monster vehicles to accommodate all those things.  What few of them ever ask is: Do they own those things or do those things own them?

“Sometimes I think that our greatest pleasures come from the simplest things,” Mr. Hall wrote in Possum Trot Farm (1949). I will testify to that.  Flowers, birds, and the stars are linked inextricably with memories of my parents, grandparents, extended family, and close friends…..memories of how my aunt would appreciate and mimic the songs of birds in nearby trees as we sat in her back yard on sunny Sunday afternoons in the 1950s, and of how my father and I taught ourselves to know the stars and planets on nights in 1964.

“Hours and flowers soon fade away” are words I heard when I was a boy.  Indeed, I sat beside them one day in 1956.  Those words were placed in block letters below the face of a large clock in Forest Park, the premier public park in the city of St. Louis.  It was a working, mechanical clock thirty-five feet in diameter and decorated with thousands of colorful flowers.  The “Floral Clock” was unveiled in 1951 as a memorial to American veterans of the Korean War.  It appeared on picture postcards in the 1950s-‘60s. [See here.]

It is hard for me to accept that fifty-seven years have now gone by since the day my mother took a picture of her young son sitting by that Floral Clock.  It is now long gone.  No one standing there today would know that it was ever there.  Those hours and flowers have indeed faded away.

Thomas Carlyle wrote: “When I gaze into the stars, they look down upon me with pity from their serene and silent spaces, like eyes glistening with tears over the little lot of man.  Thousands of generations, all as noisy as our own, have been swallowed up by time, and there remains no record of them any more.  Yet Arcturus and Orion, Sirius and Pleiades, are still shining in their courses…..”

And they are still there today, looking down upon fools who imagine their multiple gadgets and relentless noise make them the greatest thing in all creation.  No wonder that lumberjack wanted little or nothing to do with such creatures.

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