When I was eleven my mother married again, and we moved back East to an apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan on East Thirty-fifth Street. I would live there for six years before going away to college. This change was wrenching: socially, economically, and geographically. I was bewildered by it—a penthouse apartment, Jesuit prep school, Saturday afternoon trapshooting at the New York Athletic Club’s Travers Island range, debutant balls at the Plaza and the Pierre. Gone were the rural, agricultural, and desert landscapes to which I was so attached. They were replaced by summers on the Jersey shore and by visits to eastern Alabama, where my mother had grown up.

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.

much of what seemed to me so worth addressing—the psychological draw of landscape, that profound mystery I sensed in wild animals (which reading Descartes had done nothing to dissuade)—was regarded as peculiar territory by other nascent writers at the university.

an understanding that my voice, steeped in Jung, Dante, Heisenberg, Melville, and Merton, was not the only voice. My truth was not the one truth. My tongue did not compose a pinnacle language. These other voices were as indispensable to our survival as variations in our DNA.

Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn’t come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.

Aside from enclaves of birds in the jungles of Ecuador and Peru or wildlife in isolated parts of Congo, few undisturbed terrestrial spots remain for any late-twentieth-century observer.

Bonaireans politely and easily compliment each other by saying so-and-so speaks three or four languages, lending the island a cosmopolitan aspect, but this is rarely true. What some people learn in addition to the language they are born to, which of course they may speak poorly, is almost always the “supermarket idiom” of another language, a tropeless speech of commercial transactions and declarative conversation—unengaged, impersonal, pleasant. It is the language of international air carriers, phatic and anemic. To listen closely to its banalities, or to hear no other, fuller language spoken in place of it, is eventually to become terrified. It is the language that matches the meals served at my resort.

The paintings and drawings were similar to ones I had seen in northern Spain, in Arnhem Land in Australia, at Brandberg in Namibia, in canyons on the Colorado plateau. The evidence of humanity in each place is tantalizing, replete with meaning, but finally elusive, inscrutable.

the essential wildness of the American landscape is reduced to attractive scenery. We look out on a familiar, memorized landscape that portends adventure and promises enrichment. There are no distracting people in it and few artifacts of human life. The animals are all beautiful, diligent, one might even say well behaved. Nature’s unruliness, the power of rivers and skies to intimidate, and any evidence of disastrous human land management practices are all but invisible. It is, in short, a magnificent garden, a colonial vision of paradise imposed on a real place that is, at best, only selectively known.

In the years I have traveled through America, in cars and on horseback, on foot and by raft, I have repeatedly been brought to a sudden state of awe by some gracile or savage movement of animal, some odd wrapping of a tree’s foliage by the wind, an unimpeded run of dew-laden prairie stretching to a horizon flat as a coin where a pin-dot sun pales the dawn sky pink. I know these things are beyond intellection, that they are the vivid edges of a world that includes but also transcends the human world.

know there should be eloquent evocations of the cobbled beaches of Maine, the plutonic walls of the Sierra Nevada, the orange canyons of the Kaibab Plateau. I have no doubt, in fact, that there are.

The astonishing level of my ignorance confronted me everywhere I went. I knew early on that the country could not be held together in a few phrases, that its geography was magnificent and incomprehensible, that a man or woman could devote a lifetime to its elucidation and still feel in the end that he or she had but sailed many thousands of miles over the surface of the ocean. So I came into the habit of traversing landscapes

To find the rivers dammed and shrunken, the soil washed away, the land fenced, a tracery of pipes and wires and roads laid down everywhere, blocking and channeling the movement of water and animals, cutting the eye off repeatedly and confining it—you had expected this. It troubles you no more than your despair over the ruthlessness, the insensitivity, the impetuousness of modern life. What underlies this obvious change, however, is a less noticeable pattern of disruption: acidic lakes, skies empty of birds, fouled beaches, the poisonous slags of industry, the sun burning like a molten coin in ruined air.

What is true is that man has a power, literally beyond his comprehension, to destroy. The lethality of some of what he manufactures, the incompetence with which he stores it or seeks to dispose of it, the cavalier way in which he employs in his daily living substances that threaten his health, the leniency of the courts in these matters (as though products as well as people enjoyed the protection of the Fifth Amendment), and the treatment of open land, rivers, and the atmosphere as if, in some medieval way, they could still be regarded as disposal sinks of infinite capacity, would make you wonder, standing face to in the wind at Cape Mendocino, if we weren’t bent on an errand of madness.

It is through the power of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward it is memory that carries the place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity.