Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2025
Why nature?
My focus in this and the following chapter is on the refuge from the human world afforded by natural environments. Why this focus? Why exclude other types of possible refuge? One answer is that it doesn't exclude these others for, as we’ll see, it is partly through their association or adjacence with nature that other places are often sought as refuges. Another answer is that, from page one, human relationships with nature have been an important theme of this book. It was with a walker's depression at the devastation of a landscape that the book began, and “eco-misanthropy” was a prominent topic in the first few chapters. Exploring the prospect of a quietist's refuge in nature is a continuation of the theme.
A further answer is that natural environments are the refuges that figure by far the most saliently in the literature of refuge. The rhetoric of refuge in nature is unparalleled by one of refuge in anything else. We’ve already encountered examples of it, for instance in Wordsworth's lament that we have become “out of tune” with nature. A few decades after Wordsworth's poem, Thoreau wrote of the “sweet and tender … innocent and encouraging society” to be found in nature, even for a “poor misanthrope” like himself. A century later, another American misanthrope, the environmentalist and anarchist, Edward Abbey, proposed that, since “the world of men is … ugly, cruel, trivial [and] unjust”, the only thing for an “honest man” is to withdraw and “cultivate your own garden [or] look to the mountains”. Characters in a book by W. G. Sebald, tired of existence in the “so-called real world”, resolve to spend their lives out of doors, with “plants and animals” as their “companions”.
The idea of nature as refuge is also pervasive in Asian quietist traditions. It is commonplace, for example, among the Tang poets. When Wang Wei becomes sick of “the affairs of the world”, it is to his “old forest home” that he goes. The Daoist monasteries to which poets often repaired were typically situated in remote natural environments.
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