Introduction
A human is an integral part of nature, though in the modern age of technology people seem to have forgotten about this. There is hardly a person these days that will agree to exchange a life full of comfort for wilderness in which a person is his/her provider of services, food, and entertainment. How come that people started underestimating the significance of wilderness? How come that they never strive to stay alone with their thoughts somewhere amidst nature where the foot of man has never stopped? Modern people are too busy to appreciate the beauty that surrounds them; they are even busier to go to the places where this beauty is untouched and to feel connected with this beauty at least for a moment. Wilderness is of no interest to those who got used to spending their time in stuffy offices making money for large corporations and occupying their minds with how to use only twenty-four hours of the day more effectively. Wilderness, the longing for which should be partly present in all the people, became inaccessible to them. At present, wilderness is perceived as a place where people can escape from their hectic lives: “Seen in this way, wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save the planet” (Cronon 69). Thoreau treats wilderness as a way helping to reach isolation; this isolation enables a person to perceive the society more objectively and start enjoying the benefits of solitude, to grasp the essence of life, and to discover and admire those things which people’s ‘too-muchness, as stated by Cronon, does not allow enjoying.
Using isolation and solitude to change the attitude towards life
First of all, wilderness, according to Thoreau, helps a person to use isolation from society and, correspondingly, solitude, to start perceiving life and society more objectively. In the wilderness, a person is surrounded by pure justice, by the law of nature, by the world in which one may see the consequences of one’s actions and enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. Over the decades spent in a society, all the people have shaped definite ideas about it. Since most of the jobs in this world are monotonous, the events which take place in one’s life are often taken for granted. It is only by staying alone that a person can analyze his/her life and place in society. This allows forming an objective attitude towards it. Concerning modern society, such an attitude concerns its development or what people have acquired over the centuries of their evolution. A person can feel the difference between what the civilization has brought into the society and what wilderness can offer him/her:
It [wilderness] takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. (Turner 15)
Such a vivid contrast between wilderness and civilization presents an objective view of society. This view does not criticize society for the excessive use of technology; nor does it try to convince that wilderness is better than modernization or vice versa. It contrasts them as if they were two different colors, black and white, for instance, or any other two opposites. Such a view posits that there is nothing wrong with the longing for comfort and modern conveniences, but at the same time, it creates an idea that it is possible to survive without them for there are still people who manage to do this. It is only in complete isolation that a person may realize this thin border between criticism and objectivity and only by staying alone with one’s thoughts can a person understand what he/she indeed thinks about modern society.
In addition, wilderness allows enjoying the fruits of one’s labor. The matter is that large cities consume these fruits almost completely with a person having to be thankful for small mercies. Wilderness allows evaluating a person’s possibilities because, once there is nothing in the person’s way and nobody to give the products of one’s labor to, the person works for him/herself and sees how much he/she can do. For example, Thoreau mentions that, even though these days people enjoy their independence, their labor is rarely fully appreciated. He believes that a laboring man “has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine” (Thoreau 5). In his “Walden”, Thoreau describes his growing food by himself and using the products of his hard labor to his benefit. What is even more important, however, is that this hard labor resulted in the shift of his values and attitudes towards the outside world: “My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks” (Thoreau 203). A person living in the city can hardly have such auxiliaries and enemies; it is only in the wilderness that a person starts being concerned with the gifts of nature, rather than with intrigues, hatred, stress, nervousness, and fear which the life in the modern society entails. In this way, wilderness gives people isolation which further helps them to change their attitudes towards society, estimate their possibilities, and to use their labor for their benefit.
Understanding the essence of life and learning from nature’s simplicity
Secondly, wilderness enables a person to understand the essence of life and to learn from the simplicity of nature. Thoreau keeps to the idea that wilderness gives a person a possibility to grasp the essence of life and to realize its real value. The woods allowed him to live deliberately, to be independent, to learn from his own mistakes, and to live by his own rules:
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Thoreau 117)
Wilderness allows people to learn from nature; modern people have lost this ability due to their access to other means of learning. Being surrounded by the availability of resources, people started using only those which lie on the surface. This explains the decline of modern art, architecture, and everything that is connected with creativity. People became geniuses in other spheres – photography, engineering, molecular biology, nuclear physics, etc. There are no more poets, artists, architects, and the like talents whose works could be carried through the centuries and left to the descendants. No more admiring nature, no more love agony, no more sufferings of the genius who has been never sufficiently praised; all this is gone with people turning into cold, self-seeking, and money-obsessed individuals. The essence of life does not anymore consist in leaving something good for the descendants; the day of the genius is not anymore reduced to spending some quality time in the wilderness admiring the singing of birds, the sound of the rain, and the smell of the flowers. Wilderness can give much more inspiration than any of the modern creations; this is where its biggest value consists. Wilderness evokes feelings hidden deep inside the person; it awakens the genius and convinces a person that rhyming one’s thoughts just to bring pleasure into the world is better than making up advertising slogans thus wasting one’s talent.
Moreover, wilderness provides an opportunity to learn from the simplicity of nature. The laws of nature are as simple as possible and, unfortunately, this is what society is reluctant to imitate. The world of abundance led to people not coping with all the things they have to do. Thoreau mentions that people spend too much time on details, which is why they have no time left for something really important:
… let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail … Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it is necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. (Thoreau 118)
Wilderness makes the life of a person simpler for nothing distracts a person from what has to be done. In this way, wilderness helps to concentrate and develops a sense of order and responsibility. It gives an individual an example to follow, an example of a simple, but orderly life where there are no deadlines and delays and where people themselves bear responsibility for their actions. Thus, wilderness creates a favoring environment for a person whose aim is to understand the essence of life and to make it simpler.
Arousing interest to the things which were unnoticed before
And thirdly, judging from Thoreau’s experience, wilderness arouses a person’s interest in things that remained unnoticed before. As it is known, humans have five main senses: hearing, sight, taste, smell, and touch. Unfortunately, big cities do not allow using these senses to their fullest extent. This especially concerns sight and hearing which are responsible for the individual’s feelings. The matter is that an image accompanied by a sound can evoke certain feelings in a person, such as anger, pleasure, calmness, irritation, etc. Most of the people who live in big cities do not react to unusual sounds because, for the years of living in constant noise, they have forgotten how to enjoy sounds. Similarly, using the same ways to get to the job (school, college, etc), people have lost the skills of seeing beauty in the things that surround them. A person in the wilderness gets amazed with the beauty of the landscapes, sweetness of the smells, and diversity of the sounds all of which have been unknown to him/her earlier. Thoreau gives several examples which testify to the fact that people have forgotten how to distinguish the beautiful among things that they face every day. Thus, for instance, unexpectedly even for himself, Thoreau discovered that he had a certain affection for fire and wood:
A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth … I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in my shed before the snow came. (Thoreau 329)
Could a person living in a city ever develop an affection for wood and fire? It is doubtful, for the city people do not have an opportunity to enjoy the crackling of the fire, smell of the firewood, and unbelievable warmth that spreads over the body once the fire is lit. As far as the sounds are concerned, people also get used to them. However, Thoreau observes that they become extremely distinguishable once a person becomes estranged from them:
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. (Thoreau 150)
This shows how alien that whistle has become for Thoreau and how easy he could distinguish it among natural sounds which he has got used to for the time he spent in the woods. Wilderness made his hearing adapted to the sounds of nature and, just like these sounds are unusual for the one who gets into the forest for the first time, the whistle of the locomotive became unusual for Thoreau who also hardly ever noticed it someday. Thus, wilderness intensifies people’s feelings making them able to notice the beauty of the nature surrounding them.
Conclusion
In conclusion, wilderness can change the life of any person due to its creating solitude and isolation in which people can find what is concealed in them. Therefore, wilderness allows people to acquire an objective view of society and evaluate their labor potential due to them themselves using the products of their labor. Moreover, wilderness helps people learn from nature, which makes them understand the true essence of life and learn from nature’s simplicity. And, finally, wilderness evokes feelings which some people might be unaware of and helps them duly appreciate the beauty of the nature that surrounds them.
Works Cited
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1995.
Thoreau, Henry D. Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. Dover: Courier Dover Publications, 2002.
Turner, Frederick J. The Frontier in American History. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, LLC, 2008.