EXCERPTS

From For the Beauty of the Earth:

Birding — Watching birds is one of those pastimes that will fill all the time and space available, and it is as well to have at least plenty of time on your side. Wildlife does not perform for us on cue, and excursions into the world of nature are as unpredictable as anything I know.

Opera — The Ring is arguably the most heroic attempt in all of art to portray the conflict of our material desires and our ultimate dependence on nature, our cosmic kicking against the pricks and all the complexities it produces. Whether one sees it as mythic struggle, as an allegory for the industrial revolution or as psychological metaphor, the forces that engage each other throughout all four operas are man and nature. The music takes nature’s part, leaving the poem to man.

And Other Journeys — [In] the Provençal landscape spread out below me, the sense of continuum was altogether more heartening. On all sides, wherever a plot could be worked, the lands were being cultivated as they have been for centuries. With their villages and castles, their orchards, vineyards and fields of lavender and hay, the maze of lanes and byways, they are beyond question part of a human landscape.