{"id":5916,"date":"2010-10-07T12:29:14","date_gmt":"2010-10-07T16:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=5916"},"modified":"2013-07-09T14:20:33","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T18:20:33","slug":"barry-lopez-and-%e2%80%98the-tree%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/10\/07\/barry-lopez-and-%e2%80%98the-tree%e2%80%99\/","title":{"rendered":"Barry Lopez and \u2018The Tree\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

“>\"\"<\/a>

Barry Lopez by the McKenzie River near his home. Photograph by David Liittschwager.<\/p><\/div>\u201cArt and nature are siblings, branches of the one tree.\u201d \u2014John Fowles<\/p>\n

Barry Lopez often explores the relationship between landscape and culture in his nonfiction. He wrote the introduction to the \n “>thirtieth-anniversary edition<\/a> of John Fowles’s powerful, moving argument for the connection between nature and human creativity, <\/em>The Tree<\/a>, just published by Ecco Books. Lopez spoke with me from his home in western Oregon.<\/em><\/p>\n

The way that you described having to put the book down and walk away from it, \u201cits thought was as stimulating as I could stand\u201d\u2014I had that exact experience as I read The Tree<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well that\u2019s wonderful. I think John was so strongly perceived by people as a literary figure, relatively few wondered where his pattern of thought came from. A somewhat ramulose\u2014do you know what I mean by ramulose? If you look at a tangle of rosebushes and you try to trace with your eye, pick a rose, and go backwards, trying to find where it came from? Well, he had a ramulose mind, and he was captivated psychologically, emotionally, and in a literary way by these kinds of natural complexities. They endlessly entertained him.<\/p>\n

Fowles’s The French Lieutenant\u2019s Woman<\/em> is one of my favorite novels. I think of it as a book that is both a romance between humans and a romance between humans and nature. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I think you\u2019re absolutely right.<\/p>\n

It sticks with me in this intense way. I connect both love and romance and sex in that book to actual, physical landscapes. I can’t think of another novel like that. But I had never heard of The Tree<\/em> until recently. It was a revelation to me.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To me too. I\u2019m sitting on the same couch now, in the same room I read that book in thirty years ago, remembering it.<\/p>\n

What has changed in those thirty years, both for you\u2014and I know this is too big a question\u2014and in terms of your experience of reading the book?<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Well, I guess I\u2019d back up a ways. I grew up in Southern California in an agricultural region. My father walked out, so it was just my mother and my brother and I, and where I felt comforted and elevated was in the landscape away from the house\u2014the sound of wind in eucalyptus trees, the feeling of sun on my skin, and just walking in what was mostly an irrigated landscape in the San Fernando Valley. Then my mother got married again and we all moved to New York and I entered a Jesuit prep school on 83rd Street. I brought with me at the age of eleven this huge experience of what I would now call the numinous from landscapes in Southern California, the Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon and so on, and suddenly I was among a group of people who had no experience with those kinds of landscapes. Everything was about getting a liberal-arts education. I was all the time in the Metropolitan or at the Frick Collection or going to the theater. I was immersed in a completely different world. When I left to go to university, when I was seventeen, that combination of things was a tremendous, unsettled hunger in me, to be present to the complexities of the natural world in the same way that John has spoken about being present in places in Devon and Dorset, and at the same time being intellectually fascinated with the world that a liberal-arts education opens for you. Putting those two things together\u2014an intellectual curiosity (a grounding in the history of ideas in Western culture) and this terrific longing to be immersed in the complexities of the natural world\u2014made a certain kind of writer out of me, which I wasn\u2019t conscious of, of course. When a book I wrote about wolves called Of Wolves and Men<\/em> came out in 1978, my editor at Scribner said she was going to send it to Fowles, and I said, \u201cYou\u2019ve got to be out of your mind. Why would he ever be interested in what I have to say about wolves?\u201d She said, \u201cLook, you just write, let me be the publisher.\u201d He sent a lovely letter back about how much he liked the book.<\/p>\n

\"\"Oh, how wonderful that must have been. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I was flabbergasted. I\u2019m sure my ears were red with self-consciousness and chagrin that someone like me\u2014you know, you think, \u201cWho am I to go knock on somebody\u2019s door, figuratively, to go knock on John Fowles\u2019s door?\u201d He wrote a very nice encomium for the book, and that\u2019s the only quote on the back of the hardback edition of Of Wolves and Men<\/em>. I\u2019d sent him a long thank-you note about how much I admired his work, but I was very shy about it, and then The Tree<\/em> was published in 1979. I got a call about reviewing the book for Sierra<\/em> magazine, and I thought, \u201cI must do this, it\u2019s ethically imperative that I do this and read the essay very carefully.\u201d And then John and I went back and forth\u2014a letter here, a letter there. My introduction to this new edition of The Tree<\/em> is a massive reworking of that original review.<\/p>\n

It felt to me very much that you were writing this introduction now.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

When I read the review again I thought, well, this is OK, but it felt dated, not in the sense that its points were naive or out of fashion, but it lacked an immediacy that connected that essay to our time. John was talking presciently about a theme, a fault line, in modern Western culture, the root cause of a lot of our political problems, a lot of problems having to do with social organization and the environment. <\/p>\n

Many of us have had the experience of reading something when we were young and then coming to read it again thirty years later and realizing that it just doesn\u2019t have the same impact you remember it having. It\u2019s different with this piece. It was relevant in its time and it\u2019s relevant now, because I don\u2019t think John\u2019s work is so topical that it\u2019s isolated in the period in which it was written.<\/p>\n

I consider The French Lieutenant\u2019s Woman<\/em> to be a contemporary novel. <\/strong><\/p>\n

And I consider that to be the case with The Tree<\/em>. What he\u2019s urging there is not some \u201cgoing back to the land\u201d philosophy; he’s recognizing that the human mind or the human heart intertwined with the insoluble mystery of life, as it is expressed in the natural world, in the unmanipulated world, is a source of rejuvenation. If you are living in a time of despair\u2014in cultural despair, as we are now, or in personal despair after a tragedy\u2014and you\u2019re filled with grief, this essay opens up a kind of thinking that is to me, one of the ways, if not the oldest way, we have of thinking clearly about ourselves and our relationship to the world.<\/p>\n

As I read The Tree<\/em>, I kept repeating \u201cyes, yes, yes, exactly!\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

John was a man who understood what he was writing about in The Tree<\/em>. He understood how things are held together, and that kind of sensibility is one I\u2019m deeply attracted to. When you really immerse yourself in the natural world, no matter how many bird guides or explanations you\u2019ve got about what it is you\u2019re seeing, you\u2019re going to be overwhelmed. And the message is, step into it. Don\u2019t try to define nature. It is not definable or controllable. One of life\u2019s great ecstasies is to step into it. So much theater unfolds like this. When the curtains on a proscenium stage open up, you can feel your heart moving toward the stage. What is it? I want to be in it. I want to be caught up in the tidal waves of whatever the play is.<\/p>\n

That is our relationship to art, too, the best art\u2014just like the natural world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Absolutely. John had that same thing. He had this sense that there was more to be gained than ever could be understood by having a profound relationship with the numinous dimensions of landscape. It\u2019s been confusing, personally, for me since I was a child, these terms like \u201cnature writing.\u201d This always seemed bizarre to me\u2014that you would put the metaphor before the literature. It\u2019s either literary or it\u2019s not\u2014I could see making that kind of judgment\u2014but Fowles was saying, look, nature has been our stuff since the Magdalenian phase of Cro-Magnon time, at least. We know that the firestorm and hurricanes of the imagination cannot be given language until we create simile and metaphor, and the most obvious material for us to share is what our senses bring to us. So you and I look together into this big canyon or at this grove of trees or something, and I can turn to you and say, \u201cYou know, I feel like that.\u201d And you would know exactly what I mean. <\/p>\n

Because this huge, numinous thing would be connecting even two humans\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

And then you\u2019re not alone. Then you\u2019re not cut off and alone, knowing that no matter how you try to play your cards you\u2019re going to end up a dog dead by the side of the road, forgotten by everybody. I think this feeling is so widespread in American society. So many people feel that even though they\u2019ve created an atmosphere of accomplishment around themselves that the moment they\u2019re gone, they will be forgotten. It\u2019s like the moment you lose your life jacket after the ship goes down, and you sink, no one will notice that you sank, no one will notice that you\u2019re missing. Part of the great personal work of the twenty-first century is to create a place in the world where you\u2019re not constantly threatened by the idea that you\u2019re expendable, that you could be done away with and no one would care.<\/p>\n

The grandeur of nature makes you still feel that way too, and yet you don\u2019t mind.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

No, because you step into it. You know you\u2019re included, necessary. In fact, you\u2019re loved. I remember this woman once\u2014I was traveling up north in a village and I was morose one day in this small village\u2014this older woman said to me, \u201cBarry, what\u2019s making you sad?\u201d And I said, \u201cI think I\u2019m just homesick.\u201d She looked at me and said, \u201cDon\u2019t you understand? When you miss your place, your place is missing you, and this is how you feel it.\u201d She took the reciprocity for granted.<\/p>\n

What a beautiful perspective to have.<\/strong> <\/p>\n

Absolutely. Isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n

Right, the idea is that when you are pining for a missed connection, you imagine you are alone in feeling it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You do. And that\u2019s because you always imagine yourself talking to the world and that no one can hear you. Then you realize that there is that connection, and you renew it by walking out the way John describes his taking a walk at the end of The Tree<\/em>. It\u2019s an exercise in sanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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