I traversed the stone plain as directed, but, in spite of the frankness of the land, I came on the horse unawares. In the first moment of recognition I was without feeling. I recalled later being startled, and that I held my breath. It was laid out on the ground with its head to the east, three times life size. As I took in its outline I felt a growing concentration of all my senses, as though my attentiveness to the pale rose color of the morning sky and other peripheral images had now ceased to be important. I was aware that I was straining for sound in the windless air and I felt the uneven pressure of the earth hard against my feet. The horse, outlined in a standing profile on the dark ground, was as vivid before me as a bed of tulips.
"I think for people like myself—male, white, educated, seventy-four years old—the goal now has to be to listen. We're trying to find a way of life that will work for everyone, and you cannot do that if you don't listen to other people. You can't find your way back to your own elders, if that were even possible."
Has our culture as a whole lost touch with the natural world?Oh, sure.
And when this occurs, what happens to the culture?
The culture becomes solipsistic. It produces too much self-referential material and loses a sense of itself in the world because it creates too much of the world in which it lives. The reason you go into unmanaged landscapes is in part to get out of a world in which all the references are to human scale or somehow devised from a sense of human values.
So by going into these landscapes, you have a chance to learn about something that's nonhuman?
It encourages you to think in a pattern that's nonhuman. The proportion, line, color, and activity in wild landscapes are not arranged according to human schedules or systems of aesthetics. It's important to expose yourself to this. Otherwise you have no check on your philosophy except what you make up.
...
I went to Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton was, in 1966. That's the point at which I made the decision that I wasn't going to go into a monastery. The work I wanted to do with my life—I didn't have anything specific in mind—I was going to do outside. The monastic life is very attractive to me, probably more as an abstraction than as a reality.
...
At Notre Dame it was a requirement for undergraduates to take four years of philosophy and two years of theology. You were exposed to the thinking of Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard.
The courses that were of lasting importance were these in philosophy and theology, not because you believed one way or the other, but because you realized from them that you had to be responsible in your life for what you did. You had to be responsible as a human being, responsible as a writer.
...
...I found that some of the things I'm trying to talk about as a writer are not things of interest to other cultures. If you can make sense of things for your own culture, that's quite enough.
Is this what you were trying to do in Arctic Dreams?
Yes. The Arctic was a place where I could examine some of these large issues. One of the critical things in the book for me is coming to an understanding of what North America has to offer us. When Frobisher sailed into Frobisher Bay in 1576, he thought the land to the north was Asia, and what lay to the south was North America. He thought he had discovered a passage down which he could sail to the Spice Islands and China. When he came back to England and made his presentation to Queen Elizabeth, he offered her the opportunity to name the southern land. She called it meta incognita, the unnknown land.
North America is the meta incognita of our Judeo-Christian, Western European civilization. We are still in the process of discovering North America. We are still looking for the Northwest Passage, trying to find a passage through our projected understanding of North America to a real understanding of it.
The Voice of the Landscape (Verlyn Klinkenborg in NYRB, 2019)
"Landscape" is a special word for Lopez; it evokes his core beliefs. The land is the entity he's always investigating, whether he's traveling with scientists or indigenous peoples or on his own. To him, the land is a creature, "an animal that contains all other animals…vigorous and alive." It's "sentient and responsive." It's also the source of language, which, Lopez writes, isn't "something man imposes on the land. It evolves in his conversation with the land." Even the oceans—so often regarded "as waiting grounds, empty places waiting to be defined by an event"—are "a type of consciousness" for Lopez, who adduces "a unique Polynesian epistemology" rediscovered only in the twentieth century: "The primary frame of reference was not land surrounded by water but a mass of water containing widely scattered bits of land." The Polynesians inhabited the oceans the way other cultures, with equal percipience, have inhabited the land.You can't learn these ways of looking at land and water from within what Lopez handily calls "civilization." Nor will you find there his conception of animals, which, he wrote forty years ago, "are no more literally like us than are trees." These are indigenous ways of knowing. The special value of Lopez's work has always depended on his belief that scientific knowledge and traditional knowledge are parallel, not contradictory. This isn't a philosophical conclusion. It's an experiential one, drawn from years of travel and acquaintance with people whose way of inhabiting the landscape has nearly been lost.