Essayist Roger Rosenblatt considers the force of nature.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: After something like the murderous and flattening tornado hit of Alabama and other parts of the South, the inevitable question should be met by the inevitable answer. Nature doesn't care. Nature is not American. It does not believe in protecting the weak, in individual dignity, liberty, a fair judiciary, nor any of the other stuff we hope to be made of. It believes in equal opportunity but only to the extent that it is an equal opportunity destroyer. Yes, it sometimes doles out its pleasures equally too but not out of a bonificent or democratic urge or out of any impulse we can detect or name.
Nature goes its own sweet and sour way, and whatever we choose to make of it illuminates us alone. This is a hard view to accept, which is why it has been met with centuries of resistance. So much more appealing is the romantic fantasy that daffodils dance with exuberant pleasure, that the sun shines to express our happiness, that the heavens weep. But one hard look at nature's normal activities demolishes all that. See El Nino tumble a home down a mud hill, or a caterpillar eaten alive by a wasp because the wasp likes his food that way. Those famous PBS nature programs that dress up in wonder the sight of some poor creature being chased and clawed to death by a stronger one. The wonder is ours but the terror and the suffering are the animals. Where is kind and generous nature? Or, for that matter, where is cruel and calculating nature?
The poet A. E. Houseman had it right. Witless nature will neither know nor care. The people walking hopelessly and hopefully through their rubble in the South asked why the tornado could not have done its damage elsewhere on some uninhabited plain. This is what people do who think of nature and divinity as one. It seems easier on the spirit not to do that. A cold understanding of nature diminishes expectations, reduces unhappy surprises. It allows us to use nature as a mirror of the slow but does not concede nature the soul's identity. This may be the basis of the Narcissicis--not vanity per se but the act of seeing in nature in a pool of water all that one loves most, the self.
Thoreau liked to have it both ways, of course. In Walden, he could adore the serenity of the woods and clouds and at the same time describe vultures picking at Carionne as messengers of nature's lovely appetite. Stephen Crane was more directly honest and persuasive. In the "Red Badge of Courage" the deserter soldier looks to the sky for solace in his torment and sees the indifferent sun as a pale wafer. The eye of nature is made of glass. Even inside us nature does not care. DNA does not. Genes do not care. We inherit the genes that will make us die. Richard Dolphins points this out in his book "River Out of Eden." But generally we die late. Until then, we are children playing on swings and slides, yet carrying within our bodies a bomb destined to explode.
Nature doesn't care. Knowing all that, people still have a power over nature which was recently exhibited in that destruction in the South. Nature may not care but people often do, in spite of storms of human murderousness which, in fact, always have a design, however mad. People plan, calculate, and are frequently kind, thus, flattened homes are rebuilt, drowned towns resurface, territories riven by earthquakes heal, all because of the will of survivors to help themselves and one another. That which does not make sense is made sensible in that. Feeling is restored out of the wreckage. Human protest against indifference is the only weapon one has against nature, human and otherwise, when a wind for no reason comes out of nowhere. I'm Roger Rosenblatt.
