High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [97]
I found I could do neither. Not wholeheartedly. But like the boy who fought the Jabberwock in Through the Looking Glass, I took my vorpal sword in hand. For the sake of people who love me and the sight of mountains that move my soul, I would come galumphing back, to face the tyranny of words without meaning and monsters beyond my ken.
I came back because leaving was selfish. A country can be flawed as a marriage or a family or a person is flawed, but “Love it or leave it” is a coward’s slogan. There’s more honor in “Love it and get it right.” Love it, love it. Love it and never shut up.
THE FOREST IN THE SEEDS
In the springtime of my twenty-fifth year, and my first as a graduate student in ecology, I was seriously introduced to biological field research. The project to which I was assigned involved sitting in a mesquite thicket in the southern Arizona sun, watching a species of territorial lizard do, quite frankly, almost nothing. For hours and hours, day after day. It was stultifying. When I’d signed on as a rookie animal behaviorist, I suppose I was thinking of Konrad Lorenz’s curiously malimprinted geese, who thought he was Mama Goose and followed him around; or of legendary Iwo, the genius macaque, who invented grain winnowing and introduced it to her tribe. Visions of sandhill cranes danced in my head. And here I had washed up instead in the land of torpid lizards. I could only be grateful that my subjects at least had heartbeats, and pity my botanically inclined colleagues who were counting pollen grains under a microscope, or literally watching the grass grow.
Nature does not move in mysterious ways, really. She just moves so slowly we’re inclined to lose patience and stop watching before she gets around to the revelations. The natural historians of the nineteenth century knew this, or at any rate they had no reason to expect bells and whistles, and they had the luxury of writing for an audience with an attention span. Charles Darwin charmingly suggests as much in his introduction to On the Origin of Species: “It occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out of this question [of the origin of species] by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it.” Twenty-two years later he’d reflected on everything from slave-making ants to the Greenland whale and set it all down on paper, and for any reader willing to spend a portion of a lifetime with it, it remains a thorough masterpiece.
Henry David Thoreau, Darwin’s contemporary, shared the penchant for accumulation and reflection, and while he did not shake the scientific paradigm so profoundly, he brought to his work an expansive poetic sensibility. Like other modern fans of his who had long since finished all the Thoreau in print, I rejoiced when Bradley P. Dean compiled from the massive notebooks of Thoreau’s last two years a collection of previously unpublished writings, Faith in a Seed. The book contains fragmentary treatises on wild fruits, weeds and grasses, and the succession of forest trees. But the centerpiece is Thoreau’s last important manuscript, The Dispersion of Seeds, in which he meticulously noted methods of seed ripening and dispersal, germination, and growth of a great many species: pines, willows, cherries, milkweeds, eight kinds of tick clover, and virtually every other plant known to the neighborhood of Concord, Massachusetts. With a categorical thoroughness akin to Darwin’s, Thoreau intended to prove his conviction—which was still in dispute at the time—that new plants do not spontaneously generate but, rather, grow always and only from seeds.
It’s hard to imagine grown men of science being uncertain of a thing that our first-graders now might