To read John Fowles’s The Tree while in the midst of writing one’s own book about the natural world is to confront the likelihood of failure. Not failure to spin a good yarn, necessarily, but failure to articulate the essence of one’s relationship with a particular and cherished piece of wild earth. “What I gain most from nature is beyond words,” Fowles writes about a third of the way through his elegant book-length essay. “To try to capture it verbally immediately places me in the same boat as the namers and would-be owners of nature: that is, it exiles me from what I most need to learn.”

What is it that he, and by extension we, most need to learn? I think he was advocating for a kind of unlearning — not a willed ignorance of nature, per se, but a peeling away of much that our culture has drummed into us about how we ought to see nature (as a limitless resource), and whether we ought to feel nature in our bones (the central story of our culture, after all, has us falling away in permanent estrangement from the original garden). For Fowles, his father’s ruthlessly pruned fruit trees, shaped for maximum yield, represent the prevailing human view of nature: it is there to be used, and it is ours to manipulate. We seek to dominate it, he argues, partly out of fear and hostility. We cannot quite accept that is has no use for us.

Fowles, by contrast, is drawn to untamed trees, wild copses, abandoned pastures, overgrown farms. They represent in the tangible world the place where the human mind journeys in sleep — “the green chaos,” he calls it, “the deep forest and refuge of the unconscious.” To step into wild and pathless woods is to enter a kind of dream, the way uncertain, the tree shapes sinuous and erotic, time itself (human time, clock time) a suddenly meaningless abstraction. Indeed, to spend time among untamed woods is to feel oneself dissolve just a bit at the edges. Later, in the regained wholeness of our relentless selfhood, we may find we have been subtly reshaped in ways we can’t quite define.

Fowles died in 2005, but I like to think he’d have been delighted by the continuing existence of my summer job as a fire lookout in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, where I’m surrounded by 3.3 million acres of trees. Though I’ve written a book about the job and the landscape, I wholeheartedly concur with Fowles when he says that what he gains from nature is beyond words. Words are an unceasing part of my daily life. I am, like Fowles, a writer, constantly wrestling with language. But on summer evenings, when I step off my lookout tower and wander in the woods for what remains of the daylight, the words blessedly disperse like a flock of startled birds. I am, for a moment, a being stripped of his tongue: no one near to listen and nothing at all to say. After a thousand evenings of such wanders over a decade as a lookout, I am no closer than I ever was to finding the words for how it feels to be alone in a gently quaking grove of aspen at dusk, or for the precise character of the mingled joy and peace I derive from sitting beneath an ancient Douglas fir. That many of my favorite trees will outlive me causes me no anguish. I wish them well; they have been like friends to me. What we have between us is a kind of secret it would seem a trespass to elucidate.

Fowles argues that books and photographs of nature serve only to stand in the way of a true feeling for it. His book might thus appear to us a paradox, an example of the thing about which he is rightly suspicious — except it is the furthest thing from a prescription. In its humility and gentleness, its beautiful metaphor-making, it is a form of invitation — an invitation to a celebration at which you find yourself your own host.

Philip Connors
Silver City, New Mexico
October 2010

Philip Connors is the author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout (Ecco; April 2011). Visit Phil’s mountaintop perch and learn more about the book here:

Connors has worked as a baker, a bartender, a house painter, a delivery man, and an editor at the Wall Street Journal. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, n+1, Salon, the Nation, the Chicago Tribune, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review, Dave Eggers’ Best Nonrequired Reading anthology and the bestselling State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. He is the editor of The New West Reader: Essays on an Ever-Evolving Frontier. Originally from Minnesota, he lives in New Mexico with his wife and their dog.

“No art is truly teachable in its essence. All the knowledge in the world of its techniques can provide in itself no more than imitations or replicas of previous art. What is irreplaceable in any object of art is never, in the final analysis, its technique or craft, but the personality of the artist, the expression of his or her unique and individual feeling.”
— page 42

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross responds to ReadRollShow about the passage.

“[The 20th Century] is in fact the first to show some sort of general and international concern [for nature]; and I do not think we should be too self-congratulatory about that. The future may well judge that we had both the scientific awareness and the political organization, the potential, to do much more than we have done.”
—page 63

“What I gain most from nature is beyond words.”
—page 32

Author (and fire lookout) Philip Connors confronts Fowles’s idea that “what I gain most from nature is beyond words.”

“[My father's] refusal to be moved by what moved me in nature was perhaps largely a product of his own conditioning; but its function (without my realizing it, of course) was very similar to what pruning does for young fruit trees—that is, to direct their growth and determine their future.”
—pages 20-21

“The real threat to us in the coming millennium lies… in our growing emotional and intellectual detachment from [nature].”
—page 71

During an interview with Diane Ackerman about her forthcoming book, One Hundred Names for Love, she explained, “All of my books are about nature and human nature, but especially about the intersection where they meet and can throw light on each other. Because there really is no distinction: Everything is nature.”

From there, the conversation turned to the “real threat” passage in The Tree. Here’s Ackerman’s response.

“The most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge…. We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability—however innocent ad harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.”
—pages 33, 39-40

“In order to protect nature we’ve turned it into a consumer item.”
—page ix

The line is pulled from Barry Lopez’s introduction to Ecco’s 30th anniversary edition of The Tree. “I feel no qualm in saying Fowles has set his teeth neatly in one of the central issues of our time,” writes Lopez, “our real and imagined distance from the natural world.”

Here’s the passage leading up to his remark about consumerism and nature:

“Do we feel that unless we create evidence—photographs, journal entries, picked and pressed flowers, tape recordings, pocketed stones—we haven’t actually been intimate with nature?

“I think every one of us has had these doubts, and tried privately to thread an intelligent way through them, if for no other reason than being innately suspicious of all the ballyhooing of nature that goes on, as politically necessary as it may be. In order to protect nature we’ve turned it into a consumer item, and we are repelled by the thought.”

Thirty years after Fowles articulated his ideas in The Tree, is the consumerist lens through which we view nature—and the consumerist language we use to defend it—culturally inescapable?

Have we become so detached from nature in our daily lives that we feel compelled to take a piece home in order to validate our tenuous connection? Count the items around you, at home or in your office. Here: a dozen photographs on the walls (mountain lake, aspens, storm clouds, waterfall, sunset…), rocks from a Colorado river bottom, a ramekin filled with pebbles from a Dorset beach…

Do your keepsakes give you comfort?

“Older and less planned quarters of cities and towns are profoundly woodlike, and especially in this matter of the mode of their passage through us, the way they unreel, disorientate, open, close, surprise, please.”
—page 61

“The modern version of hell is purposelessness.”
—page 53

The quote above is Fowles’s conclusion to a longer passage in The Tree that arises from his consideration of Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy (as Wikipedia calls him).

Is purposelessness hell? What do you think? Can you find examples in your own life to support or counter that idea?

Here’s the entire paragraph from Fowles:

“I come now near the heart of what seems to me to be the single greatest danger in the rich legacy left us by Linnaeus and the other founding fathers of all our sciences and scientific mores and methods—or more fairly, left us by our leaping evolutionary ingenuity in the invention of tools. All tools, from the simplest word to the most advanced space probe, are disturbers and rearrangers of primordial nature and reality—are, in the dictionary definition, ‘mechanical implements for working upon something.’ What they have done, and I suspect in direct proportion to our ever-increasing dependence on them, is to addict us to purpose: both to looking for purpose in everything external to us and to looking internally for purpose in everything we do—to seek explanation of the outside world by purpose, to justify our seeking by purpose. This addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield, has now infiltrated all aspects of our lives —and become effectively synonymous with pleasure. The modern version of hell is purposelessness.”