How to Experience the Jungle

March 28, 2008

Euclides da Cunha in his essays on the Amazon worries about the boredom of the scenery: "There is something unearthly about this amphibian nature, this mixture of land and water, that is hidden, completely at ground level, within its very grandeur" (32). A bit later he gives some actual advice about how to enjoy this scenery that could be seen as monotonous:

In the Amazon, what generally takes place is the following: the observer who wanders the basin in search of its varied perspectives, at the end of hundreds of miles, derives the impression that they have circled about in a closed loop filled with the same beaches and walls and islands, the same forests and stagnant sloughs called igapos stretching out to empty horizons farther than the eye can see. By contrast, the observer who stays at the margins is intermittently astonished by unexpected transformations. Scenes that are repetitive in the realm of space change over time. To the eyes of the person in motion nature is stable; to the eyes the sedentary person whose project it may be to subject that nature to the stability of human cultivation, it seems frighteningly changeable and fragile, and the appearance of that mutability occasionally overwhelms him. [13-14]

That paragraph should be savored. It occurs to me that what Euclides has to say about the experience of Amazon jungles applies to life more broadly. One temptation of life is to grab as much experience as possible.. maximizing the quantity of new things. We throw ourselves into the jungle and try to really "see it all." But on this approach experience becomes a blur; everything starts to look the same. The right way to experience the jungle is to stay in one place and watch the transformations that come with time.. the the light falls differently during the day, the way the patterns of leaves constantly shift. The implication here in this passage is that experience can be richest through patience and attentiveness to time.

This passage more generally reminds me of the work of William Bartram.. which although biologically and botanically correct in terms of its descriptions, often seems to be insinuating something about life. Birds become melancholics and mosquitoes lead to questions of life's value.