Separation is the theme today. You see it everywhere: in the dog behind a gate, separated from his pack, in the Latin binomials used by Carl Linnaeus and others to abstract individual beings from their ecologies, in agriculture, in urban planning . . . everywhere. I am not saying anything new, of course; Freud and others discussed this in various discussions of modern life, and it is the crisis that marks the meaning of the first book of the Christian bible.
Is some separation good? Probably. The nuclear family shows major weaknesses but I am sure its logic was clear to those who suffered within the extended family, but like many things it is probably more the result of aggressive marketing with corporate profit as its ultimate motive and motif. Separating the words in a sentence? The medieval habit of writing sentences with no spaces between individual words seems awkward now but maybe it was not such a hardship for readers of the time. A few days ago I was puzzling out an inscription carved into a stone baptismal font, the entire perimeter containing an unbroken chain of letters. The task left me deeply immersed in the text. I wonder if, by making the assumption of written language easier, the scribes who inserted spaces between their words did not also lessen the power of their writings. There does not seem to be an appreciable spacing between spoken words. So why was it deemed necessary to render written language this way?
The most marked change I have experienced since moving from an American city to the Italian countryside has been my reemersion in the nonhuman world. First it was the forested mountains above Lake Como, now it is the more rural Alpine valley of Chiavenna. Trees dominated the first landscape, animals the second, although both features obtain in both places.
Without a doubt, the reconnection with the nonhuman environment has made me more of a human, or at least a better human. The hunter-gatherer tribe, the family farm . . . it is easy to romanticize these configurations but it is clear that we lost something essentially human when we moved away from them, although one can make the argument that agriculture was the beginning of the end. I suppose I speak in relative terms.
Our cities are social and environmental disasters, precisely because they separate us from our fellow nonhuman residents. Inserting plants and animals into them is just a cruel deception and abuse. Trees do not thrive, aligned like soldiers along a boulevard; they need to congregate in their natural ecologies, ecologies that no doubt have space, and a need for, human beings.
Is some separation good? Probably. The nuclear family shows major weaknesses but I am sure its logic was clear to those who suffered within the extended family, but like many things it is probably more the result of aggressive marketing with corporate profit as its ultimate motive and motif. Separating the words in a sentence? The medieval habit of writing sentences with no spaces between individual words seems awkward now but maybe it was not such a hardship for readers of the time. A few days ago I was puzzling out an inscription carved into a stone baptismal font, the entire perimeter containing an unbroken chain of letters. The task left me deeply immersed in the text. I wonder if, by making the assumption of written language easier, the scribes who inserted spaces between their words did not also lessen the power of their writings. There does not seem to be an appreciable spacing between spoken words. So why was it deemed necessary to render written language this way?
The most marked change I have experienced since moving from an American city to the Italian countryside has been my reemersion in the nonhuman world. First it was the forested mountains above Lake Como, now it is the more rural Alpine valley of Chiavenna. Trees dominated the first landscape, animals the second, although both features obtain in both places.
Without a doubt, the reconnection with the nonhuman environment has made me more of a human, or at least a better human. The hunter-gatherer tribe, the family farm . . . it is easy to romanticize these configurations but it is clear that we lost something essentially human when we moved away from them, although one can make the argument that agriculture was the beginning of the end. I suppose I speak in relative terms.
Our cities are social and environmental disasters, precisely because they separate us from our fellow nonhuman residents. Inserting plants and animals into them is just a cruel deception and abuse. Trees do not thrive, aligned like soldiers along a boulevard; they need to congregate in their natural ecologies, ecologies that no doubt have space, and a need for, human beings.
