Nietzsche, Friedrich

The most acutely suffering animal on earth invented laughter.

from the Antichrist

Mankind does not represent a development of the better or the stronger or the higher in the way that it is believed today. `Progress' is merely a modern idea, that is to say a false idea. The European of today is of far less value that the European of the Renaissance; onward development is not by any means, by any necessity the same thing as elevation, advance, strengthening.

The word `Christianity' is already a misunderstanding--in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross. The `Evangel' died on the Cross. What was called `Evangel' from this moment onwards was already the opposite of what he had lived: `bad tidings,' a dysangel. It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a `belief,' perchance the belief in redemption through Christ, the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian: only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the Cross lived, is Christian.

from Nachlass

What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently; the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here. This future speaks even now in a hundred signs, this destiny announces itself everywhere; for the music of the future all ears are cocked even now. For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.

Olivier, Lawrence

A paraphrase from memory of a story I heard on PBS radio told by Sir Laurence Olivier with a Jewish accent:

This is a story about a poor, wretched Jew named Daniel who lived in the darkness of the Polish shtetl during the first years of this century. The shtetl, as you know, was the meager piece of earth that was reserved, out of the necessity after all of finding some place no matter how desolate, for the children of Abraham and Isaac - that stubborn people who despite every effort to convince them otherwise maintained the belief that their duty lay in reciting the age old prayer, the Shema: Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one! Blessed is His glorious kingdom for ever and ever.

Daniel recited it, too. But shall we say their was more of respect than piety in his observances? For Daniel was a representative of that new breed of men who had heard the furtive whisperings of socialism in the dark alleys and sweat shops of the town. The word socialism was practically itself the long awaited Messiah for the downtrodden Jews of that long ago day, and Daniel was no exception. The trouble was that the messiah was only a rumor on the wind, and nobody had yet seen it in reality. And in the meantime, the daily grind continued. At least for Daniel's father, who was a pious Jew, the world offered its condolences through the hundred and one simple pleasures through which God speaks to the simple. Every morning when he woke, Daniel's father would go to the window, breathe deeply and say with a smile, "Good morning, O my God!" Daniel would wake and say, "Oh my God what a morning!"

One night a dream came to Daniel. He was walking in a strange city, which seemed to be a very great city, along the banks of a great river and under a high and magnificent bridge. He came to a stop and heard a voice very plainly say to him: "Daniel, this is the city of Vienna, and this river is the Danube. Under your feet is buried a treasure. You have only to come and dig it up to make it your own."

Well, Daniel awoke baffled by the eery clarity of the dream which did nothing however to erase its absurdity. In fact, he gave no thought whatever to the idea of going to Vienna to find a treasure.

But he had the same exact dream the next night. Naturally, this produced just about precisely twice the amount of bafflement, but still Daniel gave no thought whatever to Vienna. It could not have been different in his case. Poor Jews from Polond did not take holiday in Vienna. Poor Jews had no papers to travel. Nor money to travel. Especially when it was about a dream. No, Vienna did not enter into his thoughts. It was only that the dream was troubling for some reason.

And the next night it was troubling again. And this time the voice had said, "What! Daniel! Still in bed in Poland, with a treasure waiting for you in Vienna?"

For two weeks, the dream came every night. Eventually the voice was becoming less polite and even edged toward sarcasm: "Daniel! What is it going to take, an engraved invitation?"

Daniel couldn't bear it any more. He told his father, and together they consulted, of course, the rabbi.

The rabbi didn't criticize or laugh, or suggest medicine and bedrest. He took Daniel and the dream very seriously, to everyone else's surprise, and he declared that Daniel would have to make preparations to go to Vienna. Papers could be forged under an assumed name. As for money, the old man took an old key from his desk, opened the small box which contained the pathetic treasury of his congregation, and gave Daniel enough money to make everything possible.

Daniel was flabbergasted. But soon everything was arranged. In a new suit, under a new name he boarded a train for Austria. Customs officials gave him nary a glance. He found himself walking in the city he recognized from his dream, along the banks of the same river, under the same bridge. He had chosen a late hour when no passing citizens would see his figure stooped low over a shovle and digging in the ground.

Unfortunately, he was noticed, by the guards on the bridge. "Hey you! What are you doing down there?" they called out. And unfortunately again, it had hours before been raining, and the ground was muddy and slippery. Surprised and alarmed by the voices of the guards, Daniel lost his balance as he came down on the shovel with his foot, and together with the shovel he went tumbling down the banks and into the river. Of course you know that the Danube is not blue, that it is dirty and grey, and bitterly cold. Poor Daniel, alas, could not even swim.

"Help, help!" he cried in desparation trying to stay afloat. The water was fast and overpowered him. The guards laughed and pointed hilariously at him. At this, gulping wate, he managed to shout "Death to the damned Archduke!!!"

That was a challenge that simply could not be ignored. Little as they desired to get muddy and wet fishing a nefarious stranger out of the water, still, it had to be done. And when they'd got him, and drained his lungs of the water, and revived him, they beat him to within a day of his life and dragged him back to the barracks to be dealt with by their superior officer.

Daniel lay shivering on the floor, his clothes in shreds, his body bloodied. The officer was immaculately dressed and stood stiffly in front of him. In the voice of one of those jaded men of the world who view the opportunity to exercise ultimate power over another human as a welcome diversion from the tedium of life, he said, "We would be so grateful to hear from you what you were doing digging under that bridge, since you are obviously a foreign spy and looking for something. Won't you be so kind as to tell us what it is. . . before we shoot you."

Daniel, as you can imagine, was in no mood to be shot. Had he asked to come to Vienna? Had he deserved to have a dream night after night. Without hesitation, he told the officer the complete truth, including his real name, and that he was only a poor Jew from Poland, and that he had had a dream. He told everything.

The officer and his men grew more and more amused as Daniel went on. When he'd finished, the officer looked at him with scorn.

"You filthy Jews!" he said with contempt, one eye blinking madly behind his monocle. "Why not leave the middle ages and live with the rest of us in the modern world? Look at me! I am an educated man. A man of culture. One cannot control dreams. I myself have had a dream. Believe it or not! I have been having a very similar dream every single night for the last two weeks, and it is always the same. I am in a tiny Jewish village in Poland, in the dirty little house of a poor Jew named Daniel, and I’m standing in front of the stove. A voice comes to me, saying `Beneath this stove there is a treasure. It is for you. You have only to come and claim it.' Now do you think that I would rush away, get on a train and go looking for a Jew named Daniel in Poland. Why there must be a thousand such Daniels in Poland. Look at me! I am an educated, a cultured man. Obviously, you are no spy. You are pitiful. Go. Leave Vienna. Go home, but go fast before I change my mind and shoot you anyway!"

Daniel didn't waste any time. That very night, he was back on the train to Poland, and in two days back in the shtetl of his birth, and running up the stairs to his house. His father greeted him, but he pushed him aside. Like a madman, he rushed to the stove. Dragging it across the floor, he cleared the old wooden planks which covered what he dared hope would be...

Indeed a treasure was buried in the floor. Perhaps not a great treasure, but a vast sum for a poor Polish Jew. The rabbi and the congregation made a handsome profit, and Daniel and his family used the money to come to America and settle comfortably in the new world, thereby escaping the holocaust which otherwise would have devoured them.

There are two morals to this story. One, always follow your dreams. The other, our treasure is often right under our nose, but sometimes we have to leave home to find it.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose

from "On Point of View in the Arts",

reprinted in Writers on Artists, ed. by Daniel Halpern

2. In the museum we find the lacquered corpse of an evolution. Here is the flux of that pictorial anxiety which has budded forth from man century after century. To conserve this evolution, it has had to be undone, broken up, converted into fragments again and congealed as in a refrigerator. Each picture is a crystal with unmistakable and rigid edges, separated from the others, a hermetic island.

And, nonetheless, it is a corpse we could easily revive. We would need only to arrange the pictures in a certain order and then move the eye - or the mind's eye - quickly from one to the other. Then, it would become clear that the evolution of painting from Giotto to our own time is a unique and simple action with a beginning and an end. It is surprising that so elementary a law has guided the variations of pictorial art in our Western world. Even more curuous, and most disturbing, is the analogy of this law with that which has directed the course of European philosophy. This parallel between the two most widely separated disciplines of culture permits us to suspect the existence of an even more general principle which has been active in theentire evolution of the European mind....

3. Movement implies a mover. In the evolution of painting, what is it that moves? Each canvas is an instant in which the mover stands fixed. What is this? Do not look for something very complicated. The thing that varies, the thing that shifts in painting, and which by its shifts produces the diversity of aspects and styles, is simply the painter's point of view.

...

Nonetheless, it is not the geodetic quantity of distance which decisively influences the painter's point of view, but its optical quality. "Near" and "far" are relative, metrically, while to the eye they may have a kind of absolute value. Indeed, the proximate vision and the distant vision of which physiology speaks are not notions that depend chiefly on measurable factors, but are rather two distinct ways of seeing.

If we take up an object, an earthen jar, for example, and bring it near enough to the eyes, these converge on it. Then, the field of vision assumes a peculiar structure. In the center there is the favored object, fixed by our gaze; its form seems clear, perfectly defined in all its details. Around the object, as far as the limits of the field of vision, there is a zone we do not look at, but which, nevertheless, we see with an indirect, vague, inattentive vision. Everything within this zone seems to be situated behind the object; this is why we call it the "background." But, moreover, this whole background is blurred, hardly identifiable, without accented form, reduced to confused masses of color. If it is not something to which we are accustomed, we cannot say what it is, exactly, that we see in this indirect vision.

The proximate vision, then, organizes the whole field of vision, imposing upon it an optical hierarchy: a privileged central nucleus articulates itself against the surrounding area. The central object is a luminous hero, a protagonist standing out against a "mass," a visual plebs, and surrounded by a cosmic chorus.

Compare this with distant vision. Instead of fixing a proximate object, let the eye, passive but free, prolong its line vision to the limit of the visual field. What do we find then? The structure of our hierarchized elements disappears. The ocular field is homogeneous; we do not see one thing clearly and the rest confusedly, for all are submerged in an optical democracy. Nothing possesses a sharp profile; everything is background, confused, almost formless. On the other hand, the duality of proximate vision is succeeded by a perfect unity of the whole visual field.

4. To these different modes of seeing, we must add another more important one.

In looking close-up at our earthen jar, the eye-beam strikes the most prominent part of its bulge. Then, as if shattered at this point of contact, the beam is splintered into multiple lines which glide around the sides of the vase and seem to embrace it, to take possession of it, to emphasize its rotundity. Thus the object seen at close Then, as if shattered at this point of contact, the beam is splintered into multiple lines which glide around the sides of the vase and seem to embrace it, to take possession of it, to emphasize its rotundity. Thus the object seen at close range acquires the indefinable corporeality and solidity of filled volume. We see it "in bul," convexly. But this same object placed farther away, for distant vision, loses this corporeality, this solidity and plentitude. Now it is no longer a compact mass, clearly rotund, with its protuberance and curving flanks; it has lost "bulk," and become, rather, an insubstantial surface, an unbodied spectre composed only of light.

...

5. A final and decisive observation.

When we oppose proximate to distant vision, we do not mean that in the latter the object is farther away. To look means here, speaking narrowly, to focus both ocular rays on a point which, thanks to this, becomes favored, optically privileged. In distant vision we do not fix the gaze on any point, but rather attempt to embrace the whole field, including its boundaries. For this reason, we avoid focusing the eyes as much as possible. And then we are surprised to find that the object just perceived - our entire visual field - is concave. If we are in a house the concavity is bordered by the walls, the roof, the floor. This border or limit is a surface that tends to take the form of a hemisphere viewed from within. But where does the concavity begin? There is no possibility of doubt: it begins at our eyes themselves.

The result is that what we see at a distance is hollow space as such. The content of perception is not strictly the surface in which the hollow space terminates, but rather the whole hollow space itself, from the eyeball to the wall or the horizon.

This fact obliges us to recognize the following paradox: the object of sight is not farther off in distant than in proximate vision, but on the contrary is nearer, since it begins at our cornea. In pure distant vision, our attention, instead of being directed farther away, has drawn back to the absolutely proximate, and the eyebeam, instead of striking the convexity of a solid body and staying fixed on it, penetrates a concave object, glides into a hollow.

6. Throughout the history of the arts in Europe, then, the painter's point of view has been changing from proximate to distant vision, and painting, correspondingly, which begins with Giotto as painting of bulk, turns into painting of hollow space.

This means there has been nothing capricious in the itinerary followed by the painter's shift of attention. First it is fixed upon the body or volume of an object, then upon what lies between the body of the object and the eye, that is, the hollow space. And since the latter is in front of the object, it follows that the journey of the pictorial gaze is a retrogression from the distant - although close by - toward what is contiguous to the eye.

According to this, the evolution of Western painting would consist in a retraction from the object toward the subject, the painter.

11. ...

Proximate vision dissociates, analyzes, distinguishes - it is feudal. Distant vision synthesizes, combines, throws together - it is democratic. The point of view becomes synopsis. The painting of bulk has been definitively transformed into the painting of hollow space.

12. ...

The premises formulated in our first paragraphs may seem to imply that the evolution had terminated when we arrive at the painting of hollow space. The point of view, transforming itself from the multiple and proximate to the single and distant, appears to have exhausted its possible itinerary. Not at all! We shall see that it may retreat even closer to the subject. From 1870 until today, the shift of viewpoint has continued, and these latest stages, precisely because of their surprising and paradoxical character, confirm the fatal law to which I alluded at the beginning. The artist, starting from the world about him, ends by withdrawing into himself.

...Now to look at something with the central ray of the eye is what is known as direct vision or vision in modo recto. But behind the axial ray the pupil sends out many others at oblique angles, enabling us to see in modo obliquo. The impression of concavity is derived from the modo recto. If we eliminate this - for example, by blinking the eyes - we have only oblique vision, those side-views "from the tail of the eye" which represent the height of disdain. Thus, the third dimension disappears and the field of vision tends to convert itself entirely into surface.

This is what the successive impressionisms have done....Painting tends to become planimetric, like the canvas on which one paints. One arrives, then, at the elimination of all tactile and corporeal resonance. At the same time, the atomization of things in oblique vision is such that almost nothing remains of them. Figures tend to be unrecognizable. Instead of Painting objects as they are seen, one paints the experience of seeing. Instead of an object an impression, that is, a mass of sensations. Art, with this, has withdrawn itself completely from the world and begins to concern itself with the activity of the subject. Sensations are no longer things in any sense; they are subjective states through which and by means of which things appear.

Let us be sure we understand the extent of this change in the point of view. It would seem that in fixing upon the object nearest the cornea, the point of view is as close as possible to the subject and as far as possible from things. But no - the inexorable retreat continues. Not halting even at the cornea, the point of view crosses the last frontier and penetrates into vision itself, into the subject himself.

13. Cubism

Cezanne, in the midst of his impressionist tradition, discovers volume. Cubes, cylinders, cones begin to emerge on his canvases. A careless observer might have supposed that, with its evolution exhausted, pictorial art had begun all over again and that we had relapsed back to the point of view of Giotto. Not at all! In the history of art there have always been eccentric movements tending toward the archaic. Nevertheless, the main stream flows over them and continues its inevitable course.

The cubism of Cezanne and of those who, in effect, were cubists, that is, stereometrists, is onoy one step more in the internalizing of painting. Sensation, the theme of impressionism, are subjective states; as such, realities, effective modifications of the subject. But still further within the subject are found the ideas. And ideas, too, are realities present in the individual, but they differ from sensations in that their content - the ideated - is unreal and sometimes even impossible. When I conceive a strictly geometrical cylinder, my thought is an effective act that takes place in me; but the geometric cylinder of which I think is unreal. Ideas, then, are subjective realities that contain virtual objects, a whole specific world of a new sort, distinct from the world revealed by the eye, and which emerges miraculously from the psychic depths.

Clearly, then, there is no connection between the masses evoked by Cezanne and those of Giotto; they are, rather, antagonists. Giotto seeks to render the actual volume of each thing, its immediate and tangible corporeality. Before his time, one knew only the Byzantine two-dimensional image. Cezanne, on the other hand, substitutes for the bodies of things non-existent volumes of his own invention, to which real bodies have only a metaphorical relationship. After Cezanne, painting only paints ideas - which, certainly, are also objects, but ideal objects, immanent to the subject or intrasubjective.

...

This equivocal cubism is only a special manner within contemporary expressionism. In the impression, we reached the minimum of exterior objectivity. A new shift in the point of view was possible only if, leaping behind the retina - a tenuous frontier between the external and internal - painting completely reversed its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects. Note how, by a simple advance ofthe point of view along the same trajectory it has followed from the beginning, it arrives at an inverse result. The eyes, instead of absorbing things, are converted into projectors of private flora and fauna. Before, the real world drained off into them; now, they are reservoirs of irreality.

It is possible that present-day art has little aesthetic value; but he who sees in it only a caprice may be very sure indeed that he has not understood either the new art or the old. Evolution has conducted painting - and art in general - inexorably, fatally, to what it is today.

14. The guiding law of the great variations in painting is one of disturbing simplicity. First, things are painted; then sensations; finally, ideas. This means that in the beginning the artist's attention was fixed on external reality; then, on the subjective; finally, on the intrasubjective. These three stages are three points on a straight line.

Now, Occidental philosophy has followed an identical route, and this coincidence makes our law even more disturbing.

Let us annotate briefly this strange parallelism.

The painter begins by asking himself what elements ofthe universe ought to be translated onto canvas, that is, what class of phenomena is pictorially essential. The philosopher, for his part, asks what class of objects is fundamental. A philosophical system is an effort to reconstruct the universe conceptually, taking as a point of departure a certain type of fact considered as the firmest and most secure. Each epoch of philosophy has preferred a distinct type, and upon this has built the rest of the construction.

In the time of Giotto, painter of solid and independent bodies, philosophy believed that the ultimate and definitive reality were individual substances. Examples given of such substances in the schools were: this horse, this man. Why did one believe to have discovered in these the ultimate metaphysical value? Simply because in the practical and natural idea of the world, every horse and every man seems to have an existence of his own, independent of other things and of the mind that contemplates them. The horse lives by himself, complete and perfect, according to his mysterious inner energy; if we wish to know him, our senses, our understanding must go to him and turn humbly, as it were, in his orbit. This, then, is the substantialist realism of Dante, a twin brother to the painting of bulk initiated by Giotto.

Let us jump to the year 1600, the epoch in which the painting of hollow space began. Philosophy is in the power of Descartes. What is cosmic reality for him? Multiple and independent substances disintegrate. In the foreground of metaphysics there is a single substance - an empty substance - a kind of metaphysical hollow space that now takes on a magical creative power. For Descartes, the real is space, as for Velasquez it is hollow space.

After Descartes, the plurality of substance reappears for a moment in Leibniz. These substances are no longer corporeal principles, but quite the reverse: the monads are subjects, and the role of each - a curious symptom - is none other than to represent a "point de vue." For the first time in the history of philosophy we hear a formal demand that science be a system which submits the universe to a point of view. The monad does nothing but provide a metaphysical situs for this unity of vision.

In the two centuries that follow, subjectivism becomes increasingly radical, and toward 1880, while the impressionists were putting pure sensations on canvas, the philosophers of extreme positivism were reducing universal reality to pure sensations.

The preogressive dis-realization of the world, which began in the philosophy of the Renaissance, reaches its extreme consequences in the radical sensationalism of Avenarius and Mach. How can this continue? Wht new philosophy is possible? A return to primitive realism is unthinkable; four centuries of criticism, of doubt, of suspicion, have made this attitude forever untenable. To remain in our subjectivism is equally impossible. Where shall we find the material to reconstruct the world?

The philosopher retracts his attention even more and, instead of directing it to the subjective as such, fixes on what up to now has been called "the contend of consciousness," that is the intrasubjective. There may be no corresponding reality to what our ideas project and what our thoughts think; but this does not make them purely subjective. A world of hallucination would not be real, but neither would it fail to be a world, an objective universe, full of sense and perfection. Although the imaginary centaur does not really gallop, tail and mane in the wind, across real prairies, he has a peculiar independence with regard to the subject that imagines him. He is a virtual object or, as the most recent philosophy expresses it, an ideal object. This is the type of phenomena which the thinker of our times considers most adequate as a basis for his universal system. Can we fail to be surprised at the coincidence between such a philosophy and its synchronous art, known as expressionism or cubism? (page 378)

Orwell, George

from 1984

Oceania has no capital and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows.

from I Corinthians 13,

as adapted by George Orwell

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbol. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. . . Money never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

Pascal Pascal

from the Pensees

What sort of a freak then is man! How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe.

Petras, James

from Socialism" Under the Market

in Against the Current, May/June 1989

"Economic reformers," as the Western and Eastern apologists describe them, are in effect capitalist restorationists who are challenging the residual progressive socio-economic changes resulting from the revolution. The class lines are being drawn in the East between the managerial supporters of the market and working-class defenders of democratic collectivism. It is time for those on the left in the West to also define themselves, because historical experience is demonstrating that one cannot be for both the market and socialism.

Plato

from Critias, III

Contemporary Attica may accurately be described as a mere relic of the original country. There has been a constant movement of soil away from the high ground and what remains is like the skeleton of a body emaciated by disease. All the rich soil has melted away, leaving a country of skin and bone. Originally the mountains of Attica were heavily forested. Fine trees produced timber suitable for roofing the largest buildings; the roofs hewn from this timber are still in existence. The country produced boundless feed for cattle. There are some mountains wchich had trees not so very long ago, that now have nothing but bee pastures. The annual rainfall was not lost, as it is now, through being allowed to run over the denuded surface to the sea. It was absorbed by the ground and stored...the drainage from the high ground was collected in this way and discharged into the hollows as springs and rivers with abundant flow and a wide territorial distribution. Shrines remain at dried up water sources as witness to this.

Plomer, William

from Turbot Wolfe

"...I thought then, as I think now, that trade is like art. Art is to the artist and trade is to the tradesman. I think the greatest illusion I know is that trade has anything to do with customers. It must have been so long ago, almost before history I should think, so very long ago quite plain that you must never, if you are to be a success in trade, in art, in politics, in life itself, you must give people what they want. Give them what you want them to want. Then you are safe.

Pousseur

from The Question of Order in New Music

Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory

Precisely where the most abstract constructions have been applied, it is not seldom that one has the impression of finding oneself in the presence of consequences of an aleatory free play.

Proust, Marcel

from Chardin: The Essence of Things

reprinted in Writers on Artists, ed. by Daniel Halpern

Take a yound man of modest means with artistic taste, sitting in the family dining-room at that commonplace, dreary moment before the table has been completely cleared. His imagination full of the glory of museums, cathedrals, the sea, the mountains, he looks with distaste and boredom, with a sensation approaching disgust, a feeling not far from depression, at one last knife, lying next to an underdone, unsavory cutlet on a half-removed tablecloth that drags on the floor. A ray of sunshine, alighting on the sideboard, resting gaily on a glass of water still nearly full after having quenched someone's thirst, accentuates as cruelly as an ironic laugh the everyday banality of this unaesthetic sight. At the other end of the room, the yound man sees his mother already settled down to her work, slowly unwinding, with her customary calm, a skein of red wool. And behind her, perched on a cupboard, next to a porcelain platter reserved for "company," a compact, fat cat seems like the petty evil genius of this scene of domestic mediocrity.

The young man looks away. His eyes fall on the brilliant, highly polished silver platters, and down below them, on the flaming andirons. Even more irritated by the order than by the disorder of the room and the table, he envies those men of wealth and taste who move only among beautiful objects, in rooms where everything, from the tongs to the doorknob, is a work of art. He curses these ugly surroundings, ashamed of having spent a quarter of an hour experiencing not so much a sense of shame as disgust and a sort of fascination. He gets up, and if he cannot take a train to Holland or to Italy, goes to the Louvre to look for the visions of palaces a la Veronese, princes a la van Dyck, harbors a la Claude Lorrain which, in the evening, will serve only to aggravate the dullness of the young man's return to the daily scene in its familiar surroundings.

If I knew this young man I should not try to prevent his going to the Louvre, rather I should accompany him. But leading him through the La Caze gallery and through the gallery of eighteenth-century French painting or through the Rubens or some other French gallery, I would have him stop in front of the Chardins. And once he was dazzled by this rich painting of what he calls mediocrity, this zestful painting of a life that he finds tasteless, this great art depicting a subject that he considers mean, I would say to him: "This makes you happy, doesn't it? Yet what more have you seen here than a well-to-do middle-class woman pointing out to her daughter the mistakes she has made in her tapestry work (La Mere laborieuse); a woman carrying bread (La Pourvoyeuse); the interior of a kitchen where a live cat is trampling on some oysters while a dead fish hangs on the wall, and an already half-cleared sideboard on which some knives are scattered on the cloth (Fruits et animaux); and even less impressive, some kitchen or dining-room dishes, not only pretty ones like Dresden chocolate-pots (Ustensiles varies), but a shiny lid, all shapes and kinds of pots; sights that repel you like a dead fish sprawled on a table (La Raie) and sights that disgust you like half-emptied glasses and too many glasses left full (Fruits et animaux)?

If all of this now seems to you beautiful to look at, it is because Chardin found it beautiful to paint. And he found it beautiful to paint because he found it beautiful to look at. The pleasure you get from his painting of a room in which women are sewing, of a pantry, a kitchen, a sideboard is the pleasure he felt and caught in passing, isolated in time, deepened, immortalized, when he looked at a sideboard, a kitchen, a pantry, a room in which women are sewing....Had you not already been unconsciously experiencing the pleasure that comes from looking at a humble scene or a still-life you would not have felt it in your heart when Chardin, in his imperative and brilliant language, conjured it up. Your consciousness was too inert to descend to his depth. Your awareness had to wait until Chardin entered into the scene to raise it to his level of pleasure. Then you recognized it and, for the first time, appreciated it. If, when looking at Chardin, you can say to yourself, "This is intimate, this is comfortable, this is as living as a kitchen," then, when you are walking around a kitchen, you will say to yourself, "This is special, this is great, this is as beautiful as a Chardin." Chardin may have been merely a man who enjoyed his dining-room, among the fruits and glasses, but he was also a man with a sharper awareness, whose pleasure was so intense that it overflowed into smooth strokes, eternal colors. You, too, will be a Chardin, not so great, perhaps, but great to the extent that you love him, identify yourself with him, become like him, a person for whom metal and stoneware are living and to whom fruit speaks. And when they see how he reveals their secrets to you they will no longer avoid confiding them to you yourself. Still-life will, above all, change into life in action. Like life itself, it will always have something to say to you, some shining marvel, some mystery to reveal. Day-to-day life will delight you if for several days you pay attention to his painting as though it were a lesson: and having understood the life of his painting you will have conquered the beauty of life itself. In rooms where you see nothing but the expression of the banality of others, the reflection of your own boredom, Chardin enters like light, giving to each object its color, evoking from the eternal night that shrouded them all the essence of life, still or animated, with the meaning of its form, so striking to the eye, so obscure to the mind. Like the sleeping princess awakened, everything is restored to life, resumes its color, starts speaking to you, living, enduring. (103)

...

We have learned from Chardin that a pear is as living as a woman, that an ordinary piece of pottery is as beautiful as a precious stone. The painter has proclaimed the divine equality of all things before the spirit that contemplates them, the light that embellishes them. He has brought us out of a false ideal to penetrate deeply into reality, to find therein everywhere a beauty no longer the feeble prisoner of convention or a false taste, but free, strong, universal, opening the world to us. And he lauches us on a sea of beauty. (105)

Proverbs

Itallian

Saggio funciullo e chi conosce il suo vero padre.

Latin

Salus populi suprema lex est.

Zulu

You have to go fetch the future; it's not coming toward you, it's running away.

French

Happy people have no history.

Quayle, Dan

My friends, no matter how rough the road, maybe. . . We can and we will, never, never surrender to what's right. -

Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich

from an essay

included in the Selections from the Devil's Papers in 1789, and reprinted in FMR, November 1984

(After describing the inventions of a so-called "machine man" who relies on machines for everything. He has a machine for cutting quills and a machine which makes multiple copies of everything he writes, even though he writes absolutely nothing; a calculating machine, though he never worked as an auditor; a machine for chewing food, and a `dumb waiter' for serving it; machines for performing music, and even a machine for composing it by throwing dice; a machine for uttering prayers; a machine for speaking at confession and before the freemasons; machines for threshing and sowing; a machine for standing in his place at a duel; for making weather observations; for waking him, drawing his curtains, and lighting the fire; even a machine for satisfying his wife! He goes on:)

I've already said that all this is undeniably meaningful. But I will allow myself the further pleasure of imaging what life will be like when humans have achieved a much higher level in their relationship with machines. In fact, let me imagine that we are at the most advaned level, where humans have five machines to replace the five senses. They move about by means of a mechanized walkwork or wagon. They pick up not only their arms, legs, eyes, nose, and teeth from the factory, as now, but manufacture all the other limbs and the whole torso too, and slice off a section of firehose to serve as an appendix and endow it with healthy peristaltic action.

I imagine they'll carry it still further and will relieve themselves by means of hydraulic apparatus. A human won't even retain a natural individual identity any more, but will have one carved out by technicians. This, I must say, however, is especially hard to imagine.

Nor will the animals be alive any more. Archytas, Regiomontan, and Vaucanson have already given us artificial doves, eagles, flies, and ducks, and eventually the rest of the animal kingdom will doubtless be petrified and calcified, and whole lifeless menageries will be opened up, and clever people who have read Spener will think the Day of Judgment is at hand or already past. The world will be quite abominable, Natura naturans will vanish, and nothing will remain but the natura naturata , the machines without their master.

What sort of perfections, I ask, will then adorn the earth, which now stands before us in such rags and tatters? I mean, if a good head were to look out over the earth and take inventory of its perfections and assume that a being is more perfect the more it relies on machines and the more it sees such things as arms, legs, art, memory, intelligence as lying outside itself and therefore does not see any need to drag all that along with it, and perceives that animals, which live completely without machines, are for that very reason at the lowest, dirtiest level of perfection; and that the savage, who uses a few tools, occupies a higher one; and our farmer, because he operates several machines, lays claim to a still higher one; and the great and rich people who are served by the most machines are thus at the top - with what perdections would this good, inventory-taking head find the earth to be blessed? I'll tell you: with perfect fleaism, alienation, indolence, and frivolousness. Nonbeing wed to omnipotence. But all this is unthinkable before Germany's nineteenth century.

(Johann Paul Richter (1763-1825) under the pseudonym Jean Paul was a a Platonist, a novelist and satirist who, with Herder, wrote in opposition to Kant's speculative philosophy.)

Rochefoucauld

There are good marriages, there are no delightful ones.

Romero, Archbishop Oscar

Quoted in Voices from El Salvador

by Mario Menendez Rodriguez

...Christians are not afraid to fight; they are capable of fighting, but they prefer to speak the language of peace. However, when a dictatorship seriously attacks human rights and the commonweal of the nation, when it becomes unbearable, and all channels of dialogue, understanding and rationality are closed off, when this happens, then the Church speaks of the legitimate right to insurrectional violence....Choosing the moment of insurrection, determining when all channels of dialogue are closed off, is not up to the Church....I shout this warning to the oligarchy: open your hands, give your rings, because the time will come when you will have your hands cut off. (page 84)

Rostand, Edmond

from Cyrano de Bergerac

Cyrano

What would you have me do?

Seek for the patronage of some great man,

And like a creeping vine on a tall tree

Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone?

No thank you! Dedicate, as others do,

Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon

In the vile hope of teasing out a smile

On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad

For breakfast every morning? Make my knees

Callous, and cultivate a supple spine,--

Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust?
No thank you! Tickle the horns

Of Mammon with my left hand, while my right

Too proud to know his parner's business,

Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire

God gave me to burn incense all day long

Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you!

Shall I go leaping into ladies' laps

And licking fingers?--or--to change the form--

Navigating with madrigals for oars,

My sails full of the sighs of dowagers?

No thank you! Publish verses at my own

Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint

Of a small group of literary souls

Who dine together every Tuesday? No

I thank you! Shall I labor night and day

To build a reputation on one song,

And never write another? Shall I find

True genius only among Geniuses,

Palpitate over little paragraphs,

And struggle to insinuate my name

In the columns of the Mercury?

No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be afraid,

Love more to make a visit than a poem,

Seek introductions, favors, influences?--

No thank you! No, I thank you! And again

I thank you!--But...

To sing, to laugh, to dream

To walk in my own way and be alone,

Free, with an eye to see things as they are,

A voice that means manhood--to cock my hat

Where I choose--At a word, a Yes, a No,

To fight--or write. To travel any road

Under the sun, under the stars, nor doubt

If fame or fortune lie beyond the bourne--

Never to make a line I have not heard

In my own heart; yet, with all modesty

To say: "My soul, be satisfied with flowers,

With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them

In the one garden you may call your own."

So, when I win some triumph, by some chance,

Render no share to Caesar--in a word,

I am too proud to be a parasite,

And if my nature wants the germ that grows

Towering to heaven like the mountain pine,

Or like the oak, sheltering multitudes--

I stand, not high it may be--but alone!

Le Bret

Alone, yes!--But why stand against the world?

What devil has possessed you now, to go

Everywhere making yourself enemies?

Cyrano

Watching you other people making friends

Everywhere--as a dog makes friends! I mark

The manner of these canine courtesies

And think: "My firends are of a cleaner breed;

Here comes--thank God!--another enemy!"

Le Bret

But this is madness!

Cyrano

Method, let us say.

It is my pleasure to displease. I love

Hatred. Imagine how it feels to face

The volley of a thousand angry eyes--

The bile of envy and the froth of fear

Spattering little drops about me-- You--

Good nature all around you, soft and warm--

You are like those Italians, in great cowls

Comfortable and loose-- Your chin sinks down

Into the folds, you shoulders droop. But I--

The Spanish ruff I wear around my throat

Is like a ring of enemies; hard, proud,

Each point another pride, another thorn--

So that I hold myself erect perforce

Wearing the hatred of the common herd

Haughtily, the harsh collar of Old Spain,

At once a fetter and--a halo!

Le Bret

Yes...

Tell this to all the world-- And then to me

Say very softly that ... She loves you not.

Ruth’s Story

When I was a boy living in Denver, Colorado, there was a far distant outpost in the mountains, somewhere in the Uncompahgre range in the extreme southwestern part of the state, which I had never seen myself, but which I knew about through the tale of a friend.

Now, Ruth Miller was quite elderly when I knew her (which means that her story happened sometime around the turn of the century). She played viola in the community orchestra, as did I. Together with another violinist, and a cellist, we would all meet two or three times a month to play string quartets. The music was always strictly classical, of course, and our meetings had an atmosphere of refinement, and elevated conviviality. During our breaks, we would serve refreshments, and tell stories.

Ruth told us one time about her childhood in Ouray. My atlas, dating from 1972 lists Ouray with some 700 souls. Seventy years earlier there must have been far fewer, for, only imagine, Ruth was the only child in the entire settlement.

And how she did long for the comfort and pleasure of a little friend with whom she could share her lonely days! One day, her father gave her a book of children's stories, perhaps it was Alice in Wonderland. On the cover was a photograph of a lovely little girl, with long hair and a short little summer dress, smiling with expectation into the camera as if to say, "Won't you come and play with me today?"

That little girl became Ruth's imaginary playmate; for one day the image on the book became a dream, a waking dream, and the two little girls together sat and talked. They became so well acquainted they knew absolutely everything about each others families, about the arguments they had with the mothers, and the admiration for their fathers who did such grand and important things, which of course they described to each other in minute detail. On warm sunny days, they would walk together through the wildflowers and along the banks of the stream, dreaming about famous places where they promised to meet in the future, when they would be the two best friends the world had ever known, and when they would do and enjoy everything together.

Their friendship went on for sometime. No one discouraged the freedom of imagination Ruth had learned to exploit. Then one day, an amazing thing happened. Ruth's father came home with the news that they had new neighbors, a family from the East, in upstate New York. Ruth became very excited, because her father had learned that this family also had a little girl, just about Ruth's age. Ruth's father and mother gathered some welcoming gifts, and off they went to greet the newcomers.

They were, in fact, very illustrious people, not at all the kind of people one might expect to come to the frontier, a tiny mining outpost in the Rockies. Oh, Ouray was beautiful enough to charm any sort of person. But the newly-arrived Stanley's had left behind not only the comforts and pleasures of a richly urban environment in New York: they were also leaving behind their great success in that world where they had gained wealth and fame as the inventors of the sensational Stanley Steamers, which applied the steam engine to navigation in ways that had never been done before.

The Stanley's were important people in the community. They knew political and industrial leaders, and they were supporters of the arts. They knew many artists on a level of friendship, and their daughter had even posed for a famous set of photographic portraits, which were then very popular among the early patrons of that art.

Ruth herself had seen one of those portraits, and when she stood for the first time on the Stanley doorstep, and the door opened, she was dumbfounded to find standing before her the very same little girl from the book with whom she had made such a great friendship. And Ruth did indeed become very great friends with the little Stanley girl. They were friends all through their lives.

Rybakov, Anatoli

from Children of the Arbat:

"How is Sasha?" he asked.

She was slow to reply.

"Sasha - the last letter was sent from Kansk. He was supposed to go to the village of Boguchany, but nothing has come from there yet. I don't know how he got there, on foot or what. I've looked at the map...Boguchany's on the Angara River, there's no road there, so he must have gone on foot...." She smiled suddenly. "I don't know how people are taken into exile nowadays. It used to be in Stolypin wagons, but now I don't know...."

"Sofya," Mark said reprovingly, "I know it's very hard for you, but I want you to have a clear understanding of the way things are. First of all, there's no hard labor anymore. Second, Sasha has not been sent to a camp, but into exile. I have been to see the highest authorities. They intervened, but it was impossible to do anything. The law is the law. They have something on Sasha, probably nothing very serious, but something all the same. We are living in strict times, and there's nothing to be done. He's been exhiled for three years. He'll live in a village, like millions of other people who are living in villages. He'll find himself work out there. He's young, and the three years will fly by. But you must reconcile yourself to the inevitable: you have to wait patiently and calmly and not let yourself go."

Se smiled suddenly, and then again. He knew that smile well.

"So, it wasn't such a heavy sentence, only three years," she said.

"Did I say they ought to have given him more? Sofya, be reasonable! What I'm saying is that, given the times we're living in, three years of exile is a trifle. They are shooting people, you know...."
She was still smiling and looked as if she might burst out laughing.

"So, you see....They didn't shoot him. For the little verses in the wall newspaper they didn't shoot him, for the little verses in the newspaper he only got three years' exile in Siberia - thanks very much! But what's three years, just a triflt! After all, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin only got three years' exile, and he'd been organizing armed uprisings and strikes and demonstrations, he'd published underground newspapers, traveled abroad illegally, but still, only three years, and he escaped from exile, and they resettled him for the same three years. Buit if Sasha should run away, he'd get ten years in a camp, at the very least." She had stopped smiling and was now looking at her brother straight and hard. "Yes! If the tsar had sentenced you Communists according to your laws, he'd still be on the throne for another thousand years...."

He smashed his fist down on the table. "What rubbish! You're a fool! Where did you pick that nonsense up? Stop it right now! How dare you speak that way! In front of me! Yes, we do have a dictatorship, and a dictatorship means violence, but it's the violence of the majority over the minority. Under the tsar the minority oppressed the majority, which was why the tsar didn't dare use the extreme measures that we use in the name of the people and for the people. The Revolution must defend itself, otherwise it is not worth anything. Your misery is great, but it doesn't give you the right to become a philistine. You're not thinking what you're saying. If you say that kind of thing to anyone else, you'll end up in the camps yourself. Take not of that, Sofya, if only for Sasha's sake. He shouldn't lose his mother at a time like this."

She sat and listened in silence, feelinf for crumbs with the tips of her fingers and pressing them into the table. Then clamly she said: "Listen, Mark....First of all, while you're in my home never bang the table with your fist. I don't like it. Aside from my feelings, I have neighbors and it's embarrassing: my husband used to bang on the table, and now you're doing it. It must never happen again. Bang on your own table in your office, in front of your subordinates. Please don't forget this. As for the camps, don't threaten me - I'm not afraid of anything now, I've had enough of being afraid, and that's it. They can't put everyone inside, there aren't enought prisons....~A tiny minority.' How easy it is to say it! `Millions of people are living in villages.' But have you seen how they live? Don't you remember, when you were young you used to sing ~Find me the village where the Russian peasant doesn't groan'? You sang it well, with heart, you wer good, you pitied the peasant. Why don't you pity him anymore? Who were you singing about in those days? `For the people, in the name of the people' Isn't Sasha the people? Such an honest, openhearted boy, and so believing, and they send him to Siberia. They couldn't shoot him, so they send him to Siberia instead. What's left of you songs? Prisons, exile, camps. Now you pray to your Stalin..."

Mark Alexandrovich stood up and pushed back his chair.

"My dear sister - "

"Don't make a fuss, don't get excited," she continued calmly. "Listen to what I have to say, Mark. You offered my money, but you can't buy yourself off. You've raised your sword against the innocent, against the defenseless, and you yourself will perish by the sword!" She lowered her gray head and, looking at her brother from under her brows, she pointed a finger. "And when your time comes, you'll remember Sasha, you'll think of him, but it'll be too late. You did not defend an innocent man. And there'll be nobody to defend you."

...She [Nina] and Varya were now on opposite sides of the barricades. And it was not coincidence that Sofya Alexandrovna was giving her shelter; she was also on the other side of the barricades, unable to forgive the Soviet regime for Sasha's exile. But even if that had been a mistake, the Soviet regime as such was not at fault, there wasn't a government in the world that did not make mistakes. And when a fierce class struggle was going on, and the Party was forced to liquidate the remnants of hostile parties and factions and oppositions, occasional mistakes were likely to be made. (page 543)

Sale, Kirkpatrick

from The Conquest of Paradise

The end of the world: the idea was taken quite seriously by Europe of the late fifteenth century - not as a mere conceit, not as a metaphor or theological trope, but as a somber, terrifying prediction based solidly on the divine wisdom of biblical prophecy and the felt experience of daily life. The protean German historian Egon Friedell, who calls this period the "incubation" of the Modern Age, argues that "there was a general feeling of the world's end, which, expressed or unexpressed, conscious or unconscious, permeated and dominated the whole ear." Or in the words of Joseph Grunpeck, the official historian to the Hapsburg emperor Frederick III, "When you perceive the miserable corruption of the whole of Christendom, of all praiseworthy customs, rules and laws, the wretchedness of all classes, the many pestilences, the changes in this epoch and all the strange happenings, you know that the End of the World is near. And the waters of affliction will flow over the whole of Christendom."

In such an atmosphere it is not suprising that so much of Christendom reacted with an explosion of messianic milleanrianism - Armageddon at hand, the terrible words of St. John come true ("Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth"), the reign of the Antichrist, the triumph of the serpent "which is the Devil," a thousand years of misery. The British historian Norman Cohn has filled a long book with the evidence of this strange but obviously very prevalent strain of Christianity in the late Middle Ages, and the only conclusion one can reach after his elaborate recitation is that for countless hundreds of thousands of Europeans manifestly millenarian - Ranter or Thuringian, Amaurian or Taborite, Free Spirit or Franciscan - there must have been hundreds of thousands of others resonating with the same sensibilities. (page 30)

We must begin, alas, with Europe's fear of most of the elements of the natural world - a fear based, as it always is, on simple ignorance, a benightedness among the learned sectors of Europe as well as the illiterate majority, that is shocking indeed as we look at it today.

The Church offered no encouragement for any investigation into the foreordained ways of God's creatures, much less the established workings of His trees and rivers and soils, and it was sufficient for most people to know that God created them, blessed them, and then gave humans "dominion over" them. Common lore, as we know it from the bestiaries and herbals of the time...was not much better, filled with either mundane and stereotypical views (lambs are meek, lions brave, wolves crafty) or fanciful and erroneous ones (toads suck cows' milk at night, woodpeckers are dangerous predators, beech trees deflect lightning, crushed rosemary leaves tied to the right arm "shall make thee light and merry"). Medieval poetry was not more sophisticated, treating the natural world with arch and ritual formulas by which "soft zephyrs" from the "dark woods" are always wafting over "murmuring waters," and one is certain to find passion in winds, love in roses, pity in streams, anger in storms, and violence in the ocean. All this platitude and misinformation about the real world was glued together with nonsense about the monstrous and fantastic world, and held to with the same level of credulity by even the most inquiring minds of the day....

It is hardly surprising that the European mind, mired thus, should fear what it did not comprehend and hate what it knew as fearful. Nature in the broad - its storms and floods, its harsh seasons and pestilences and famines - as well as in the particular - its rodents and roaches, its wolves and werewolves - represented for most people an antagonistic, oppositional world. The familiar was daunting enough, but the unusual and the distant and the unknown were scarier still, at times nothing less than terrifying, as we know from the fairy tales of the era, and this was particularly true of those places that remained the most remote: the mountains and the forests of the wilderness....

...

But forests and mountains - and with them deserts, jungles, even islands - need not be populated to be fearsome. It was enough that these places were wild: that was the trigger to the terror. For "wild" is, etymologically, "willed," that is, self-willed, unruled unmanageable, out of control, uncivilized (as in Spanish, where "wilderness" is falta de cultura), and one is there lost, confused, bewildered. It represents for the European mind that part of nature, and that part of human nature, where the hard-learned, hard-won constraints of "civilization" do not operate, where nothing is predictable and therefore everything awaits. It was that place to which the covenant-breakers and cursed are sent by the Old Testament God, into "the great and terrible wilderness" (in the Hebrew text, incidentally, the word is tohu, or "chaos," as in the primordial darkness before Creation), and to which sinners go to purge themselves of their natural evils. It was that place so alien to human contemplation that it is seldom even mentioned, only very rarely painted or drawn, and almost never directly described for most of the period from the collapse of Rome to the sixteenth century....

This separation from the natural world, this estrangement from the realm of the wild, I think, exists in no other complex culture on earth. In its attitude to the wilderness, a heightening of its deep-seated antipathy to nature in general, European culture created a frightening distance between the human and the natural, between the deep silent rhythms of the world and the deep recurrent rhythms of the body, between the elemental eternal workings of the cosmos and the physical and psychological means of perception, by which we can come to understand it and our place within it. To have regarded the wild as sacred, as do many other cultures around the world, would have been almost inconceivable in medieval Europe - and, if conceived, as some of those called witches found out, certainly heretical and punishable by the Inquisition.

It is but a short step from the fear of the wild to the love of the tamed and from there to the imperative of human domination and control of the natural world - hence the images of the subjection and mastery of the untamed landscape that are so frequent in late fifteenth-century culture.

...

But of all the images of control, the most pervasive and most revealing is that of the formal Renaissance garden, whose style was perfected and popularized in the last third of the fifteenth century and reached its peak in the middle of the next with such careful arworks as the gardens of Compton Wynyates in England (1520) and Tivoli in Italy (1549). Here it is the hand of man and not the grace of nature that is ever-present: bushes and small trees trimmed in rigid geometric shapes to look like wedding cakes or perfume bottles, closely clipped hedges along geometric walks, blocks of flower beds in uniform colors, carefully edged lawns, and artfully distributed statues, benches, fountains, pools, and bridges....

Such a concept of mastery is not exclusive to early modern Europe, to be sure - the historical record suggests that the attempt to dominate nature began long before, with those ancient societies that became dependent on controlling animal herds and building water-control systems for agriculture and creating the monotheisms that would justify it. But it had seldom developed to this degree - "a compulsion," as the medieval historian John Block Friedman has put it, "of Western man to civilize what is rude and to dominate what is wild" - or so overtly entailed the unbridled hubris of human purpose and human right to possession and use;...

The roots of this attitude are essentially biblical, found in that creation myth which is central to any society. The Hebraic Yahweh, so little a part of nature that He actually spends most of His time using its elements to wreak vengeance on His flock, creates humans in His image and as His surrogate, "to have dominion over" all the animals of the earth, and to "replenish the earth, and subdue it"; this is reiterated enought times to make it obvious what the proper hierarchy of creatures was and who was to get the chief benefit of it all. Keith Tomas's careful study of the importance of this thought for the English refers to "the breathtakingly anthropocentric spirit in which Tudor and STuart preachers interpreted the biblical story," as with the Jacobean bishop who declared that "the creatures were not made for themselves, but for the use and service of man," or those divines who said the world would be annihilated after Judgment Day since it had been made for humans' use and would have no further purpose after their departure.

There was one other important source of such hubris, as we have seen: what was not authorized by God was sanctioned by the principles of humanism and science then being propounded with such vigor, all of them shot through with notions of human dominance, of what no less a figure than Bacon called "that right over Nature which belongs to [humans] by divine bequest." The humanist Ficino had it plainest: "Man...perfects, corrects, and improves the works of lower nature. Therefore the power of man is almost similar to that of divine nature....How wonderful is the cultivation of the soil all over the earth, how marvelous the construction of buildings and cities, how skillful the control of waterways!" Or, as the medievalist A.R. Hall has put it, "The world...existed simply to be cooked, or distilled, or mutilated in man's service."

From these elemental patterns in Europe's tapestry of nature - ignorance and fear, separation and hostility, dominance and exploitation - a discernible image emerges: of a world more mechanistic than organic, more artificial than intrinsic, more corporeal than numinous, from which intimace, sacredness, and reverence have all but vanished (it would be the achievement of the next five centuries to eliminate them entirely) and in which something colder, duller, and more lifeless presides instead.

As to the rest of what we know of Europe's ecological heritage, it can be seen written across the face of the land. With some significant exceptions, it is a record of deforestation, erosion, siltation, exhaustion, pollution, extermination, cruelty, destruction, and despoliation, all done either in the name of utility and improvement for the betterment of society or, as often, in ignorance of natural systems and the human connection to them.

The landscape of Europe had of course been a victim of this process - in ecological terms, drawdown beyond carrying capacity - for a long time: what it has meant to be "civilized" since the time of the Myceneans has entailed the increasing domination and control of the natural world. The Greek empires destroyed the once wooded hills and flowing streams of the Mediterranean through deliberate fires and urban encroachment, careless herding and overgrazing, ignorant planting and relentless cultivation; Plato wrote of visiting shrines dedicated to spirits of springs and streams where there were only dry crevices in the land. The Roman successors carried the devastation as far north as Britain, as far west as Iberia, and south into the Sahara, turning lands into granaries for their ever-growing cities and so heedlessly overdeveloping, overharvesting, and over-grazing that millions of square miles of European soils were soon exhausted and the imperium collapsed of its own inability to feed itself. During the long centuries of Christian dominance thereafter, environmental destruction was only intermittent, there being no cohesive empire to achieve it, but even then the rapacious use of nature went unchecked: England, for example, was significantly deforested as early as the eleventh century, with probably no more than 20 percent of it still wooded (and not mroe than 2 percent virgin) by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086.

Thus the legacy given to fifteenth-century Europe was straight-forward: it was right and "natural" for human societies to fell trees, clear brush, "recover" fens and marshes, till soils, plant crops, graze herds, harness beasts, kill predators and "vermin," dig canals and ditches, and in general make use of the bounty of nature that a benevolent Lord had provided for them. Increasingly from the twelfth and especially the fourteenth century on, they did just that with a vengeance. For it was indeed a struggle, a battle experienced in hostile and violent terms, an unending campaign by which, as Marx would later say approvingly, "man oppses himself to Nature...in order to appropriate Nature's products." (page 82)

Indeed, it is not fanciful to see warring against species as Europe's preoccupation as a culture, the source of its food as well as its furniture, its energy as well as its sport, its urban space as well as its agricultural sprawl, its images for the nursery as well as it pulpits. Disturbing as it may appear from our vantage, a sense of enmity and opposition, as in the more familiar kind of war, seems to have characterized the thought and action of much of fifteenth-century Europe, especially in those dark decades when the inadequacy of nature's yields brought famines and the malignancy of nature's spirits brought plagues. The diaries and letters and memoere ritual sexual abstinence (before a hunt or major communal ceremonies, for example), sanctions against and punishments for infidelity, the spacing of children to allow each the undivided attention of the parents through childhood, voluntary emigration or suicide by the old or ill, and the use of plant abortifacients. On a different scale, there were practices to prevent villages from overstressing any one environment: summer and winter migrations to different camping sites, periodic (once-a-generation) necessities of life, and no society can live without having some impact on, or even doing some violence to, the natural world: it is called survival. Is there something about the attitudes and practices of Europe that make it so different?

The answer would seem to be yes. We know too little about other societies of the world in either a comparable stage of development or contemporaneously in the fifteenth century, and even less about their ecological habits and beliefs, but the general scholarly agreement is that Europe of the late medieval era can be seen to be distinct in a number of important ways.

For one thing, it seems that its fundamental regard for nature was more hostile and antagonistic than was true of any other developed civilization. Other cultures were not uniformly so benign that they never misused their environments: China, for example, permitted its population expansion under several dynasties to lead to the clearing of forests and extermination of certain wild species; the Mayans permitted deforestation that eventually led to erosion and crop failures that in turn caused the downfall of Teotihuacan. But nowhere else was the essential reverence for nature seriously challenged, nowhere did there emerge the idea that human achievement and material betterment were to be won by opposing nature, nowhere any equivalent to that frenzy of defiance and destruction that we find on the Western record. Even China at its most statified, when it embarked on some fairly elaborate engineering projects to press back the wilderness, adhered religiously to its idea of "working with nature" and what it saw as carrying out the wishes and designs inherent in a particular river or mountain or waterfall.

"Religiously" is of course the key word. However misused and distorted, the central religions of neither the Asian nor the American civilizations permitted a separation from, or an attitude of dominion over, the natural beings and patterns of the nonhuman world. On the contrary, the religions of India, for example, most particularly Buddhism and Jainism, taught a compassion for all living things and an interweaving of humankind into the unity of nature; the wilderness of mountain and forest was not fearful there but holy (hence the image of the guru on the mountain ledge), and reverence for one or another Himalayan peak or range played a part in every local form of worship throughout that subcontinent. Of the Chinese beliefs, Taoism was perhaps most unqualified in its reverence for the natural world and the requisite place of humans in the sacred "web of life," but all of them expressed some of that; all of them expressed also a veneration for wilderness, as is seen so plainly in the traditional silk and scroll paintings, an art form well established from the sixth century on explicitly to celebrate and appreciate those places of the landscape that Western artists felt to be so fearsome....And Japan's Shintoism was an explicit nature-worshipping religion, with shrines to the gods and goddesses of mountains, springs, forests, even storms, and ceremonies (still practiced today) such as the decoration of sacred rocks and communal prayers for the passage of the moon across the nighttime sky; wilderness, again, was a manifestation of the divine rather than the lair of the devil.

Europe's technophilioa, its unchecked affection for the machine, also distinguished it among world cultures. The reasons for it are deep and tangled, but one can certainly say that Europe was more adept at turning technology to its own uses, and turning its institutions to the service of that technology, than any other society; in the judgment of Lewis Mumford, only Europe saw fit "to adapt the whole mode of life to the pace and capacities of the machine." Even those civilizations (Chinese, Persian, Japanese) that demonstrated a certain proficiency for mechanical inventiveness did not evolve an elaborate abstract system of rationality to go with it - we call it science - and thus did not develop a culture of technology, a self-propelling and self-reinforcing mode of thought that created its own purposefulness and momentum. Only Europeans, once learning of firearms from the Chinese, went on to perfect them with such ferocious skill that in the space of little more than a century they had far surpassed all other cultures in armaments; only Europeans, too, borrowing again from many other cultures, refined and perfected the technology of ocean navigation so as to beome the supreme naval power in the world by the middle of the sixteenth century, Chinese and Ottoman accomplishments notwithstanding.

Europe was also, as we have seen, uniquely a culture in flux, with its institutions and traditions in turmoil during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and far less stable and conservative in its religious customs or political systems than those ancient, encrusted regimes of long-sanctioned rule and unquestioned authority of the kind found in Mesoamerica or China or the muslim East....

Finally, there was Europe's special emphasis on material acquisitiveness and resource accumulation, usually obtained at the sacrifice of the natural world. Perhaps, as some historians think, this was a response to the difficultioes of survival on a relatively small land area...under continual pressure from a population whose growth was encouraged by Church and prince alike. Perhaps, as Braudel suggests...this is a result of its "particular social structures," which were encouraged always to expand and accumulate "on a larger scale and on a more secure footing than elsewhere - more often that not with the state's blessing." But surely the chief reason for this was the power of the still young but increasingly vigorous capitalist system moving into vacuums left by medieval institutions...: more materialist, for sure, than any other economy, more expansionist, more volatile and energetic, more linked to growth and progress, and almost everywhere without the kinds of moral inhibitions found in the world's other high cultures. William Woodruff, in his Impact of Western Man,...provides a neat summary:

No civilization prior to the European had occasion to believe in the systematic material progress of the whole human race; no civilization placed such stress upon the quantity rather than the quality of life; no civilization drove itself so relentlessly to an ever-receding goal; no civilization was so passion-charged to replace what is with what could be; no civilization had striven as the West has done to direct the world according to its will; no civilization has known so few moments of peace and tranquillity.

(page 91)

For the Noble Savage is not, as sometimes supposed, an ancient and common part of Europe's mythical heritage. Visions of the Golden AGe and Arcadia and the like go back a long way, but the images are often blatantly fanciful (houses made of sugar-andspice, for example) and the inhabitants usually undefined stick figures, nothing more specific than Adam and Eve, or Brahmin sages and Ethiopian kings, or endlessly happy children....The specific elements of the Edenic society are not found in the works of classical authors or early Christian theologians, not even in the radical sectarian dissidents of the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries, whose images ofthe Good Polity are essentially, in the words of a recent study by German Arciniegas, "built on air...poetic abstractions without consequentce."

This is of marked importance because it is the description of the Indian of the New World in the early accounts, beginning with the Santangel Letter and running for three decades thereafter, that basically created the idea of the Noble Savage in Europe and provided for European political thought the underlying characteristics of the free commonwealth. The idea of political liberty - masterlessness, a society without kings, hierarchies, laws, parliaments - really began here; so too the idea of equality - social parity, shared property, without mine or thine; the idea of social harmony - communal ease, peaceful concord, sodality, without judges and lawyers; and the idea of abundance - enoughness, living on the fruits of nature, without wants, without toil. Right from the start these were the impressions that made the New World stand for "the land of liberty," the land of Possible Paradise; as the decades went on, they became every bit as important and ubiquitous in Europe as potatoes and tobacco, two other borrowings from the same soil. When Europeans (particularly north Europeans) actually began to settle in that New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were taking back to it these ideas and ideals, expecting to see them flourish in the colonies they implanted there, a process that of course culminated in the revolution that for the first time asserted just these values to the world and sought to build a new nation upon them. Full circle.

But this positive impression of the New World, important as it was for Europe, was not the only or even the principal one: for the Noble Savage existed always intertwined with the Savage Beast, and it was the latter whose images gradually predominated, particularly in the minds of those who went to the new lands and dealt with the Indians face to face.

Cristobal Colon in this sense was quite typical. We have seen how he lost interest entirely in the gentle Tainos, so easy to subjugate, and contrived out of wish and myth the fierce Caribs who must be enslaved or slaughtered; we have seen how he conquered and ruled the Indians by force, killing fellow beings with no more compassion than a butcher for his beasts. Now, on this last voyage, when he spoke of the Indians at all it was with contempt. Thsoe who did not take kindly to his building a colonial outpost in their midst he called "very wild," and he decided on impulse to capture their kaseke; those who he decided ate human flesh he said had "brutish faces" betraying their practice; those whose language he could not understand he dismissed as "savage people." And when in the midst of the people of Jamaica, on whose hospitality he and his crew of more than a hundred had depended for an entire year, whose gifts of food and drink were all that kept the indolent and sickly foreign band alive, he wrote that he was "surrounded by a million savages full of cruelty and our enemies." By the end he seems to have quite forgotten the sweet marvelousness of those people of Guanahani, whom he now decreed to be, with all their kind, like the Wild Men who "live in hills and mountains."

This same cast of mind is evident in a great many other chroniclers of the Indians, and if their writings were not at first as popular as those of the Noble Savagists, they were actually more numerous and int he end more influential. Not surprisingly, they emerged as soon as anything of real value was seen in the new lands that were inconveniently in the hands of the natives, and after 1519, when Cortes uncovered the immense wealth of Mesoamerica, they fairly proliferated: those Indians who looked like Noble Savages when there was nothing but Guanahani to conquer came quickly to look like Savage Beasts when the treasures of the two vast continents became apparent and the stakes involved Mexico and Peru. Then, in official document and personal letter alike, with only the occasional exceptions from a man such as Las Casas, we hear again and again of the sinister nature of these foul creatures.

Here is a Dominican monk, Tomas Ortiz, writing to the Spanish Council of the Indies in mid-sixteenth century:

They are more given to sodomy than any other nation. There is no justice among them. They go naked. They have no respect either for love or for virginity. They are stupid and silly. They have no respect for truth, save when it is to their advantage. They are unstable. They have no knowledge of what foresight means. They are ungrateful and changeable....They are brutal....The older they get the worse they become. About the age of ten or twelve years, they seem to have some civilization, but later they become like real brute beasts. I may therefore affirm that God has never created a race more full of vice and composed without the least mixture of kindness or culture.

Thus the kindly cleric; here the great humanist and nationalist Juan Gines de Sepulveda:

Compare then those blessings enjoyed by Spaniards of prudence; genius, magnanimity, temperance, humanity, and religion with those of the little men [hombrecillos, the Indians] in whom you will scarcely find even vestiges of humanity, who not only possess no science but who also lack letters and preserve no monument of their history except certain vague and obscure reminiscences of some things on certain paintings. Neither do they hve written laws, but barbaric institutions and customs. They do not even have private property.... How can we doubt that these people - so uncivilized, so barbaric, contaminated with so many impieties and obscenities - have been justly conquered?

And, he concluded, Indians were as different from Spaniards as cruel people are from mild, as monkeys from men. (page 202)

...it is generally accepted among historians and ethnologist that the societies of the continent north of the Tropic of Cancer shared enough in common, in both underlying principles and the practices they gave rise to, that these particular people of the Virginia tidelands may serve as well as any other as a window onto at least a substantial part of that world.

The first thing to note is Wahunseneka's refusal to kneel, for this reveals much about the character of those assigned to leadership roles in Indian society and about the nature of that leadership. [Sale has described the clumsy attempt of the English to make a crowned king out of the supposed chief of the Powhatans.]

In one sense, Wahunseneka did not have the humility to kneel, to take a subservient position before a European stranger in front of his assemble council. The quality that seems to have typified those chosen as leaders... was a quiet dignity, as self-evident strength of character combined with an aura of appropriate gravity that impressed even the Europeans;...

But in another sense, Wahunseneka did not have the poer to kneel - that is, to be the embodiment of the tribe so as to bind all other members of it to whatever the English had in mind. As a rule, an Indian "chief" - even Wahunseneka, who may have gathered unusual power in the tribal upheavals following earlier European contacts - had only limited powers, was more a respected spokesperson than authoritarian monarch; he might be expected to ascertain and speak the will of a meeting of the council of elders, for instance, or represent the tribe in dealings with other peoples, but he would be unable to make laws or decisions unilayterally or to act in any way not sanctioned by the consensual agreements of the governing councils. That this figure was not some sort of powerful satrap of a familiar type was usually incomprehensible to Europeans, who consistently made the native "werowances" or "sachems" or "sagamores" into chiefs and those chiefs into kings and emperors, and almost never understood what their role and authority were or how to deal with them.

Of course it would have been hard for Europeans, steeped in systems of hierarchy and patriarchy, to have grasped the general egalitarianism of the typical nonstatified Indian society. Nowhere north of Mexico were there the elements of nation-states - appartuses of government, powers of taxation, agencies of enforcement, fixed aristocracies, or the like - and even where chieftaincies were hereditary and in a predetermined lineage that conferred no significant trappings of power or elevated social role. Rules and codes there were, somtimes quite complex, and sanctions and taboos operated to give them effect, but to a great degree the individual was governed by the understood obligations of community (including the community of nature) rather than allegiance to a sovereign or recognition of laws or fear of civil retribution. Pere Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary who spent a season with the Montagnais in 1634, conveyed some of this in his account in the Jesuit Relations:

Nor do they endure in the least those who seem disirous of asusming superiority over the others, and [they] place all virtue in a certain gentleness or apathy.... All the authority of their chief is in his tongue's end, for he is powerful insofar as he is eloquent; and even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.

...

Women in general were accorded high status in Indian societies and were usually equal participants in both political and economic realms. I do not find much evidence that these were full-fledged gynecocracies, as some writers have suggested, but there is no doubt about certain salient features: women throughout the Algonkian and other cultures of the East Coast could and did become tribal chiefs (and in some societies, shamans) and through matrilineal descent - from an older brother or sister - rather than as an inheritance from a father or hustband; matrilineality was the rule rather than the exception in North American tribes, and rights to certain houses or usufruncture over certain fields and plots would be passed down the female line; women were full participants in economic life, usually responsible for field-tending and often harvesting, jut- and bertty-gathering, clothes-making, food preparation, and household work, and they had control over the products of their labor, as their husbands were well aware; women had considerable choice in the selection of a hustband, done only after a man proved his competence not only as hunter and provider but as lover. Since this contrasted so sharply with the position of women in contemporary European society, where women's economic and social power, already constricted by a patriarchal culture, was further undercut by the new capitalist economies stressing production by men and outside the home, it is hardly surprising that the men who wrote about it were generally confounded about what they saw and even typically detected in it an inferior status of drudgery for women quite at odds with the truth.

...Out of a deep ethnocentric insensibility, the English then and after assumed that either the Powhatan culture was so superficial or the European one so irresistible that it should take no more than their very presence - their superior mode of dress, superior instruments of war, superior form of religion - to persuade the Indians to renounce their Americn past and become tawny English folk... When it became clear that the Powhatans had no desire to give up their culture, and indeed would resist that with some severity, the English response was simply dismissal and hostility and a reversion to warfare.

Yet a truly objective English observer (if there had been one) might well have concluded that the life of rural Chesapeake in 1607 was not inferior in any substantial way to that of rural England, save perhaps in such technologies as metallurgy and firearms, and in certain substantial ways, from abundance of vittles to individual freedom, could be reckoned superior.

It was certainly superior in its system of food supply, in terms both of efficiency and of nutrition. The Powhatan system, similar to that of probably most Indians north of Mexico, was a combination of hunting-gathering for perhaps two-thirds of the nutritional intake and shifting horticulture based on the corn-beans-squash triad for the other third; it was, as Albert Cowdrey says, "the most energy-efficient of all economic systems," based on "the most useful grain in the world" - corn, which the eastern Indians had in several varieties. This system had been developed over the centuries with a number of methods that assured its success: mound planting... instead of row planting, for example, to prevent wind and water erosion; "three-sister" farming with corn stalks as a trellis on which beans would grow and squash as a moisture-retentive ground cover, all together providing both balanced soil nutrients and a balanced diet; limited areal planting, usually in nutrient-rich riverine fields, which were allowed to lie fallow after several years to restore fertility; selecting out and sometimes breeding of wild species to ensure the most beneficial and fertile nut and fruit trees, grapevines, and root plants; hunting within both territorial and seasonal limits that generally prevented overkilling or waste; fishing with complex woven woooden weirs, so intricate that the English couldn't even repair the ones they took from the Indians; and careful forest burns that were used both to drive big game in desired directions and to encourage pioneer plant species and smaller grass-loving animals. All in all, Cowdrey concludes, these methods, "fine-tuned by millennia of learning and transmission," created an Indian food system that "had long attained a high degree of subtlety and sophistication."

The New World was well endowed, of course, a land richer in diversity and abundance of natural species that Europe, and it was kept that way by careful environmental practices; in the summary words of Carl Sauer, the historical geographer who was a pioneer in this area, "The eastern Indians lived well and at ease in a generous land which they used competently and without spoiling it." But there was more to it than that, for the Indians were also extremely competent cultivators who had worked out a horticulture that, even without domesticated animals, surpassed that of Europe. Sauer again:

In general, it may be said the plant domesticates of the News World far exceeded in range and efficiency the crops that were available to Europeans at the time of the discovery of the New World. In grains Europe had nothing to match Indian maise as to productivity, food value, utility for hill lands, and varietal adaptions to many climates.... In plant proteins and fats, Europe again was poor and the New World richly supplied by cultivated plants.... The ancient Indian plant breeders had done their work well. In the genial climates, there was an excellent, high yielding plant for every need of food, drink, seasoning, or fiber. On the climatic extremes of cold and drought, there still were a remarkable number of plant inventions that stretched the limits of agriculture about as far as plant growth permitted.

To which should be added the Indians' use of plants in medicine. Only a small protion of native medical knowledge has survived to the present, but some 150 drugs from North American Indians and a third as many from South America have been taken into the modern U.S. pharmacopoeia. Early English settlers continually reported the efficacy of Indian medical practices and many benefited directly from their curatives.... There is evidence that native drugs were used as anesthetics, antiseptics, sedatives, laxatives, purgatives, anthelmintics, stimulatnts, antitoxins, and cauterizers, and that in general shamans would also have some knowledge of surgery, massage, and obstetrics (at which they have been said to be "probably more advanced" than contemporary Europeans), in addition to those forms of psychotherapy and self-healing dismissed as "witchcraft." Comparison is difficult, but it could be said that the Indian medical system was not less develpoed than the European, and in terms of its pharmacology was more extensive.

Other aspects of Indian life, as we may see it among th Powhatans, also do not suffer by comparison to Europe's. The villages were described as clean and neat, well laid out, often with palisades of tree trunks....The houses were capacious and clean, made of wooden frames in a bread-loaf shape and covered with either woven mats or bark sheets that were protective in winter ("that notwithstanding either winde raine, or weather," said Smith, "they are as warme as stooves") and could be pulled back on either side to let in air and light the rest of the year. Artifacts were generally simple, although some were decorated with extreme intricacy, and they were plentiful, for purposes bot utilitarian (clay pots and soapstone vessels, knives of reed and flint and beaver tooth, bows and bone-tipped arrows, dugout canoes up to fifty feet long, corncribs) and decorative or religious (animal sculptures, copper and pearl and bone ornaments, beaded belts and cloths, clay pipes). Clothing, usually fringed, was commonly of deer or raccoon skin; rabbit, wolf, and other pelts ere also used, and thigh-high leggings and moccasins were worn for forest travel, and feathered headdresses of various elaborateness for ceremonial occasions. Nothing is known about the Powhatans' concepts or practices of sanitation, but the English were struck by their emphasis on washing themselves every morning and before meals, a custom that even the well-bred European (such as James I, who is reported never to have washed his hands) would have regarded as excessively ablutionary.

As with the Tainos, though, it was the warm behavior and general civility of the Chesapeake peoples - at leat until open warfare broke out - that most impressed the English chroniclers, those who occasionally got beyond the "save beast" state at any rate. Whatever their inner doubts, the Indians behaved as "a most kind and loving people," "naturally most curteous," and "very cherrefully and friendly," and did not refuse hospitality even to strangers they had no reason to like: "we were entertained by them very kindly," "they entertaines us with much welcome," "the meanest sort brought us such dainties as they had," and so on. And not to strangers alone: the gentle and intimate ways that parents related to their children were so striking that even such hard-bitten Englishment as John Smith and Ralph Hamor remarked on it with approval, the lastter noting that Wahunseneka delcared he loved his daughter "as deere as his owne life... whom if he should not often beholde, he could not possible live."

All this, carried out in a climate that was, except in the dead of winter, most benign and comfortable, must have added up to a quality of life that, even amid the disruptions brought by the Europeans, might reasonable have struck the Powhatans as hardly worth giving up for the hard, disputatious, violent, and unsettled life that the colony at Jamestown had to offer.

At this point it is important to enter a note of historiographical caution. It is not merely that the records we must work from are largely of English origin, assembled by the untutored and the condescending, or even that they cover such a limited span of years before communication between observer and observed was ruptured. It is rather that these accounts, and indeed all European accounts at the time of contact, can reflect but a pale glimmer of the original societies of the American natives. With the exception of the statified Mesoamerican cultures with surviving written glyphs and records, it is almost impossible to know anything with any great certainty about the precontact societies of the original people.

The reason is that all of those precontact societies were changed, and most quite radically so, by a century of lethal epidemics introduced from 1493 on that so devastatingly thinned their numbers - at least by two-thirds; the latest researches suggest perhaps by as much as 95 percent - that no aspect of life remained untouched. Among the diseases, new and ruinous to America, were smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, cholera, typhoid, pleurisy, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, influenza, gonorrhea, viral pneumonia, malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, and alcoholism - perhaps, according to Russell Thornton, as many as ninty-three in all. The effect of such a high mortality, and in such a short period of time, could have been only to shatter or distort a great part of the Indians' belief systems, disrupt their political and social institutions, discredit their medical practices and the healers among them, produce psychological disorientation and demoralization, kill off most of the elders who were the repositories of tribal history and traditional knowledge, demand the simplification of the cultural inventory and its technologies, force migration and regrouping of remnant populations often in areas far from sacred lands, and increase the likelihood of warefare either in the clash of migrating groups or in the search for new populations. All of this must have so fundamentally altered the basic character of those societies that by the time they came into the historical record they were simply not the same as they had been through the earlier centuries; as the historian Henry Dobyns has put it, "Aboriginal times ended in North America in 1520-24 [the first widespread small-pox epidemic], and Native American behavior was thereafter never again totally as it had been."

...

There is no record either of the psychological dislocations these survivors would have gone through, but we can imagine that the fact of deaths in this number, beyond the powers of comprehension much less cure, could be assimilable into the Indian consciousness only with considerable mental and moral upheaval, even the abandonment of parts of the ancient belief systems proven inadequate in the new circumstances. And where those new circumstances also included new settlements of the white invaders, new systems of trade, new market values, new means of survival, new technologies, and new intoxicants (woodlands Indians having nothing stronger than tobacco), the effects must have been particularly convulsive....

Obviously not all ancient forms were jettisoned, but probably none was completely unaffected and no society could have remained as it had been. What the Europeans everywhere observed and recorded, then, although they assumed ti to be a culture unchanged since the dawn of time, was one vastly altered and reordered and still in many places in a state of flux. That it could still present to them a face of such comparative stability and serenity, as it did almost everywhere, is a singular testament to what must have been the great strength and success of the original customs and beliefs.

What endured in the altered world the Europeans encountered... were those basic integuments subsequently recorded, such institutions as the hereditary chieftaincy, such systems as the matrilineal clan, such technologies as the dugout canoe and mixed-crop planting. But what endured most, it is clear, in these as in all Indian societies of which we know, was the intimate and abiding relationship with nature that informed all important acts in the passage of an Indian lifetime; it was no doubt touched and altered during the century of epidemics, but it lasted and it ws there to be recorded again and again in the historical era because it was so obviously central to the worldview of Indian culture.

Europeans usually saw this relationship in terms of religion, but at its core was in fact a body of beliefs operating more widely and even more deeply than that. The standard way of labeling it is "animism"..., which sees life in all nature and all natural objects and processes - rain and wind and climate, mountains and rivers and rocks, as much as oaks and deer and turkeys - but that does not convey the complexities that such a relationship entails: of the resulting place of the human, for example, as another species of equal but not superior stature in that web of life; of the sacredness of this living world, whose special and delicate balance has to be maintained to conserve the human population; of the necessary reciprocal and mutually dependent relations among all parts of this world, the obligations of which must be especially appreciated (and met) by the human participants; and of the continual interaction among, and communication between, all these natural relatives, ordered in the way that ancestors have painstakingly come to understand and passed down in myth and story and legend, in dance and ritual and ceremony. All of this is not casual or peripheral, somewhere at the edge of daily life or confined to weekends, but rather primary and pivotal, at the very center of existence. Abuse it, and sickness or misfortune visits; disregard it, and calamity for the whole village follows. (page 308)

Healthy Indian societies, in normal times at least, made their earth-relationship further manifest in how they lived on the land. Again, different environments fostered different approaches, but what is striking the recurrent evidence that, as hunters or fishers or planters or pickers, Indians throughout North America were ritualistically conscious of and concerned about the effects of their actions on their surroundings and careful to see that limits and constraints were everwhere observed. Obviously the processes of getting food had to involve some interference with nonhuyan nature - no society, no species survives without some such interference - and Indian societies of various times and places are known to have used fire circles to trap animals, for example, burned forest undergrowth to promote new species, planted corn in quite extensive acreage, and in places drew off streams into irrigation ditches. Still, in all of the nostatified societies the fundamental respect for the land and its creatures formed such a crucial part of the belief systems that environmental damage was minimal, and nowhere so far as we know was the notion of humans versus nature, of conquest and control, ever practiced or even formulated.

...

"The land is sacred" - it is, really, as simple as thta common phrase, known in one way or another in almost every tribe. Like the sun and wind and clouds and air, land was understood to be part of the numinous cosmic spirit, but it was so obviously precious and life-giving that it had to be accorded special reverence and respect; it had its special holy spots, besides... which gave special evidence of the holiness of creation....

...Nowhere on record did Indians ever contrive concepts of land ownership, not by individual or family or village or tribe, and the idea would have been quite foreign. Owning the land, selling the land, seemed ideas as foreign as owning or selling the clouds or the wind. There were no doubt concepts we would identify as usufruct - that is, family or village claims to a planting field or hunting ground while it is being used, and only for so long as it is used regularly - but such ideas never had very high standing and did not in any case imply possession of the European it's-my-land-and-I-can-do-what-I-want-with-it type....

...if this too brief delineation of some of the basic ideas of the Indian earth-relationship is inadequate, at least it suggests how innocent what Calvin Martin calls "the Indian thought-world" is from a belief in the idea of progress, for example, or the utilitarian view of nature, or the transcendence of material possession, or any view of creation seen only through the eyes of a single large bipedal species. Trying to see from inside the hogan and tepee, we may at least understand how far from the mark the early European observers were in theeir assumptions that the Indians were "just like us," only darker, and would, occupying the only thought-world those Europeans could imagine, succumb to the same temptations and threats; and how far from the mark have been most subsequent historians down to the present - most unfortunately the Marxist ones, mired in their materialist explanations - in their reluctance to shed preconceptions that prevent them from understanding a biocentric and ecological thought-world of considerable grandeur and pertinence.

One final aspect of the pervasive earth-relationship is perhaps most telling of all, but by no means without controversy. Although the Indians were settled across it in great numbers, particularly in the south and east, the land of North America was still by every account without exception a lush and fertile wilderness teeming with abundant wildlife in water, woods, and air. Indian societies had taken their livelihood from the land for eons, hunting, foraging, planting, fishing, building, trekking, burning, but there were still so many passenger pigeons that they darkened the sky in flight, so many sturgeons that, it was said, one could walk across the rivers, so many ancient trees that the forest often seemed impenetrable. Some reverence for nature, some elemental understanding of the human on the species level, must have been at work.

This becomes all the more impressive when we see how many people there may have been on the continent before European contact. This is a topic rife with dispute, even more so than the previous demographics of Espanola, for which there are at least Spanish censuses to rely on. In general there are two methods of estimation: one is to work back from what are hoped to be approximately reliable European surveys of the first half of the seventeenth century, figuring a depopulation of at least 70 percent and as much as 97 percent from the multiple epidemics of the previous century; the other is to try to calculate the number of people who might reasonably have been able to live in a given area with a given means of resource depletion, the settle horticulturists judged to be able to support larger numbers than hunter-gatherers. Such imperfect techniques inevitably have produced a wide range of population estimates, but there is now a rough academic consensus, quite sharply at odds with figures conventionally accepted earlier in this century, that the total number of Indians in the New World at the time of the Discovery was between 60 and 120 million people. (That compares to a population for Europe outside Russia of 60 to 70 million.) Estimates for North America alone similarly range from about 40 to 56 million, the bulk of which - perhaps 25 to 30 million - occupied the area of the Mesoamerican state systems south of the Tropic of Cancer and 8 million more the islands of the West Indies. That leaves 7 to 18 million people north of Mexico, the majority of whom were probably in the mixed horticultural-hunting belt in the Mississippi basin and along the Atlantic coast to Maine....

Whatever the exact figure...demographic and other scholars are agreed on one point: pre-Columbian North America was fairly densely populated, as such cultures go, and certainly was not the empty wasteland and untouched wilderness that Europeans took it to be. Yet it certainly gave off the aspect of an untouched world, a prelapsarian Eden of astonishing plenitude, even in just those coastan areas where population was the highest, and after centuries of occupation and use. ... and still occupying an environment that in important ways was ebullient and wild, abundant in both kinds and numbers of flora and fauna, functioning to all intents and purposes in its original primal state. If that does not argue for the Indian cultures a very special, an intrinsic, regardfulness for nature, it is hard to know what would.

The fashion of looking to American natives as ecological models, begun in the 1960s and undiminished since, has come under heavy fire in recent years from those who resist what they see as the impossibly romantic notion of idealistic tribes living in natural benignity - as, in fact, a modern version of the myth of the Noble Savage. This, they say, is a distortion of history; those people are the tribe that must be known as the Nevawas.

"The Indian revered nature because he had no other choice," as the frontier historian W. H. Hutchinson put it in leading this countercharge. "He perceived nature as being controlled by supernatural forces he was obliged to propitiate if he hoped for success in life," and that was all there was to it, no overriding spirituality, no fancy earth-relationship. "We ought to dry our eyes and recognize that the Indian was above all a self-centered pragmatist when it came to land use."

The argument tends to run this way. Indian societies were violent ones, characterized by hunting and war, in which the additional destruction of nature came easily. Whatever spiritual relationship they had with nature, the Indians obviously feared the forces around them more than they revered them and thus had no special difficulty, when the opportunities arose, in destroying both flora and fauna to their own advantage. There is good reason to think that the mass extinctions of the Pleistocene were caused by the overkills of Paleolithic hunters, and for the postcontact period evidence is plentiful that the Indians hunted the beaver to near extinction and were wasteful and careless in the slaughter of other desired animals. The only thing that prevented Indian societies from greater destruction before the Europeans was that their technologies were too primitive and their numbers too small, not that their values were too pure. The only Indians who lived any other way were the Nevawas.

It is a plausible tale, and it has won its converts. This is a murky area where sureties are not easy to come by, and hypotheses of this sort can be strung out at length with some persuasiveness. The difficulty with it, however, is that at too many points the argument rests on mere conjecture (and mean-spirited at that), and where there is evidence to test it against it does not stand up.

* There is no very good proof that precontact societies engaged in warfare that was either common or particularly fierce, and the weight of evidence suggests that they were for the most part pacific. The Indian scholar Darcy McNickle has estimated that fully 70 percent of North American tribes were pacifist, a figure hare to be sure of, although it does correlate with the estimated percentage of traditionally gynocentric tribes, characterized by high status for women and central female deities, which are said to have played down conflict and male heroics; at least two of them were recorded by Europeans as placing "all virtue in a certain gentleness or apathy" (Le Jeune) and being full of "women-like men [who] seeke rather to grow right by industrie, than famous by dees of Chevalry" (William Wood). Additional support for such an estimate comes in the numerous oral histories of Indian societies, where it is clear that warfare played so little a part that many of them, perhaps two-thirds, simply did not have war stories or battle legends of any kind; both the Algonkians of the Eastern woodlands and the traditionally peaceful tribes of the Southwest had no war myths that can be traced back before European times. The famous and popular war stories generally come from the Plains Indians, whose warrior codes and cults indeed played an important role in the later centuries, but it is interesting that virtually every one of them involves horses - and these did not appear until the seventeenth century.

Warfare was certainly known in historic times after the European invasion, sometimes