I Tried To Keep My Mind Fixed Upon The Fact Of Man's Superiority
To Nature; His Ability To Dominate And Outwit Her.
My situation was
an amusing satire on this theory.
I fancied that I could feel a
sneer in the woods at my detected conceit. There was something
personal in it. The downpour of the rain and the slipperiness of the
ground were elements of discomfort; but there was, besides these, a
kind of terror in the very character of the forest itself. I think
this arose not more from its immensity than from the kind of
stolidity to which I have alluded. It seemed to me that it would be
a sort of relief to kick the trees. I don't wonder that the bears
fall to, occasionally, and scratch the bark off the great pines and
maples, tearing it angrily away. One must have some vent to his
feelings. It is a common experience of people lost in the woods to
lose their heads; and even the woodsmen themselves are not free from
this panic when some accident has thrown them out of their reckoning.
Fright unsettles the judgment: the oppressive silence of the woods is
a vacuum in which the mind goes astray. It's a hollow sham, this
pantheism, I said; being "one with Nature" is all humbug: I should
like to see somebody. Man, to be sure, is of very little account,
and soon gets beyond his depth; but the society of the least human
being is better than this gigantic indifference.
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