The easy conclusion, in thinking about past generations and the natural world, emphasizes what they knew. There’s an assumption of discrete knowledge, of how the necessity of survival in harsh, unpredictable climates forced our ancestors to learn what we now overlook: about rains and winds and seasons and soil and tides and livestock. Our most distant ancestors knew so much about the environment that we’ve come to forget, that we can’t identify, even though these features are still part of the firmament that surrounds our lives, as goes the usual conclusion. We might teach schoolchildren about climate, evolution, and biology, but few schoolchildren end up with the ability to perceive those subjects outside of a classroom—the knowledge that’s taught is factual, it is textual, descriptive, written in empirical sentences, but not embodied as an understanding about the natural world that’s akin to a reflex. Because of this intellectual rather than perceptual comprehension, a child today is probably more adept at articulating facts about clouds, although I still might prefer a child from the past to predict the weather by looking at the sky.
I lived along the ocean for a short time, and I do have a reasonable intuition when it comes to the tides, or to the ways in which the beach hints that the ocean is becoming angry, yet I would be an ignorant, inept child if compared to a sailor from an earlier century—a sailor who somehow thrives without any navigation apps or weather reports or data about fish migration. I have visited a few farms, too, though if you put me in charge I wouldn’t know how to begin. Today’s farmers are astoundingly productive relative to the past, but I wonder what they would do if you took away all the mechanical tools and contemporary knowledge about crops and forced them, instead, to rely on a small shovel and what they discern from the soil. In a contest of ancient knowledge, perhaps I would do best when it comes to navigation, in perceiving the direction of my steps in the wilderness and in orienting myself to the sun or stars, for the accidental fact that I’ve always found this subject interesting; with this subject, however, I know that my decent navigation skills in the contemporary world are almost certainly meager compared to the skills of our mutual ancestors.
If you try to imagine how the earth appeared to most people for thousands of generations, then today does look like an uncommon age, that our understanding and interaction and perception of the environment has shifted, that there’s been an acceleration and amplification of technology so that we live in a time that’s disconnected from the typical human experience. The dichotomy is that we have more facts about our planet, our understanding of its components comes with more refinement—we can predict the weather and model soil erosion and study the behavior of bacteria—although those facts, now defined in labs, don’t trigger sensations in bodies. They aren’t tactile, they aren’t embodied, as the knowledge is more abstract, capable of observation but not capable of absorption.
And it is tricky to contemplate what even our most recent ancestors saw when they walked through the forest. How did they perceive land that was unmapped? New flowers? Unfamiliar wildlife? Life still comes with mystery, yes, but it is impossible to stroll along a path today without having first imbibed so much contemporary knowledge about what surrounds you, even if that knowledge is inchoate and confused and amateurish in any particular person. I can’t jettison the science classes that I took, all the books about biology that I’ve read, to perceive the wilderness without those layers of facts impressing upon my eyes—nor would I, it is important to add, want to lose those layers, those layers of understanding that permit me to see the world in manner that’s fitting for my time.
If I happen to walk on the beach, there’s a montage of facts that comes along for the journey. Nothing that’s conscious, but simply a loose cataloging in my mind: conclusions about what’s washed onto the beach, knowledge about the migration patterns of birds along the shore, information about ocean currents and water temperatures and marine life, even a reasonable estimate of what will occur over time—in a week, a month, a century, at the spot where I walk. I’m not deliberating these facts, they aren’t at the forefront of my mind, but they’re coloring every sight. I have a rough sense of the life cycle around me, of the ecosystem, which I’ve learned through books and in conversations that occurred inside concrete buildings rather than while standing atop the sand. And I can’t strive to perceive the ocean anew by forgetting the way in which I’ve been conditioned to see: once your eyes adjust to an illusion, you’ve lost the ability to perceive the scene without the illusion.
Not for a moment, however, do I believe that those facts provide an experience that’s exhaustive. Learning a fact, or scientific classification, is certainly useful, and I wouldn’t want to live in a world without people striving to increase this knowledge, to distinguish more about the overwhelming blackness of the universe. This is important, interesting, and inspiring, but it can also be misleading, much like how it would be misleading, at best, to tell a partner that you’re certain of your love because you feel a symphony of dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and serotonin in your brain. That would be a moment when you would be both very correct and very wrong at the same time.
To know that a rabbit is a mammal, that what you spot in the tall grasses has evolved through natural selection, that the rich colors of the soil describe its nitrogen content, is incredible, and I wouldn’t dismiss the beauty of this information—I’m actually quite ravenous to acquire more and more and more—yet I wouldn’t describe any of those facts as complete. It is remarkable, to me at least, how much I can learn about owls or snow storms or viruses while still thinking through concepts that are fundamentally abstract, that is a layer atop experience rather than coincident with experience. Nor do I think that it helps much in perceiving what our most distant ancestors, who didn’t have the same veneer of facts before their eyes, saw when they looked at the world.
The awareness that our ancestors used a very different lens makes it troublesome to fathom how they lived, even if we can project a hazy image into our mind about how they spent their days. When there’s something that I don’t understand, perhaps a bird that I’ve never seen or a brilliant plant that I can’t identify, my impulse is to search, as I assume that this information, too, is already defined and classified rather than unknowable. Perhaps the only modern corollary, I believe, is looking at the stars, in seeing the mystery of distant galaxies, if you want a communion with how our ancestors might have considered unmapped forests. Although that analogy is probably incomplete and a little too crude. Distant galaxies don’t have the same sensation as a forest that’s within reach, and the typical contemporary sensibility believes that those galaxies are unknown rather than unknowable.
If I strain, I can imagine what they might have perceived, at least a bit. The forest appears more mysterious, though that mystery is amorphous, muddled, and not exactly demarcated in my mind, almost like I am attempting to imagine a new color. I don’t want to romanticize this vision, I don’t want to describe the perception of seeing the forest without our labels and knowledge as somehow grander, more refined, or more pure, as somehow closer to what’s true. Not only is that conclusion wrong, but it is condescending: it moves away from describing our distant ancestors as born in an earlier time, with the biases and assumptions that are present in every time, and moves closer to creating a distance, describing the earlier time as more sensuous, instinctual, somehow spiritual. When spoken from a technological age, an age of medical and economic advancement, this is a belittling, tactless belief, one that creates a hierarchy between us and them—removing any sense of individuality or agency from those in the past. But this simplification feels good for those in the present. It sees virtue and purity rather than simply a past age, with its own faults, confusions, and judgements. I wouldn’t elevate or diminish those assumptions, nor do I have the capacity to know the tactical sensation of that age. Our ancestors witnessed the world in a manner that I can’t access, that I can’t grasp regardless of how far I reach.
But when I do try to imagine an unmapped forest, my mind drifts to the sensation of travel, especially travel that’s far beyond linguistic or geographic comfort. This is a crude analogy, as I am exploring areas that are already explored, yet the uncertainty and freshness of vision in these experiences might be as close as I’ve come to the unknown. There’s a dislocation that comes with travel, a questioning of norms, a sudden awareness of expectations that you didn’t know existed—everything from the height of light switches to the manners of greeting to the subtle customs of a foreign culture. So much of life is lived automatically, by reflex, with actions taken as a consequence of momentum rather than by decision, that these experiences of travel propel you into the present moment. It is the equivalent of stepping onto wobbly cobblestones after a long day, as you’re suddenly forced to measure your steps, walking with effort rather than by reflex. Encountering these situations can be enlivening; it isn’t a surprise that so many people find invigoration, intrigue, and exhaustion, in travel, in the process of seeing the world anew, and I imagine that this experience is a simulacrum of what it must have felt to walk through an unknown, unmapped forest. For many people, travel brings a capacity for wonder that they don’t find in normal life, as even the smallest details come with pyrotechnics if you’re concentrating on the precision of the moment.
I would like to cultivate this lens, to see more often with virgin eyes. It seems vital, in fact, for moments of creativity, or inspiration, for the moments when disparate elements seem to coalesce, as that won’t happen if you’re using old lenses to view the world. My sense is that I must fight against habituation, against my impulse to solidify my construct of the world, against my mind’s tendency to form artificial borders around subjects, against the definitions that populate my thinking, if I want to see what’s truly novel. What I already know often prevents me from spotting what’s new, I can’t help but notice. If I want to see the world for the first time, once again, I need to somehow dismiss what I’ve learned, and discover a way to revivify my perceptions, because creativity seems to require forgetting, it seems to require a state that’s wordless.
Once again you've taken something my mind can only graze and pinpointed it and shaped it.
Have you considered publishing a collection of your essays? I ask this because I hate reading from a computer and I'm considering printing your essays and stitching them in a handmade book, but, of course, if you were to publish a collection I would buy it instead.
I’m reading a book by James Rebanks called “Pastoral Song” about growing up on his family’s farm in England, and what he learned about the land and the old ways from his grandfather, before modernity changed rotational farming into flat, huge fields, and the cows no longer were sent to play in the Spring pasture because antibiotics could keep them cooped up, etc. Your essay reminds me that we may know more about the world now, thanks to technology, but we don’t know the world the way folks in the past did. And I agree, at least travel breaks our usual habituation, allowing us to discover (at least for ourselves) new experiences, people, and environs. Great post, Charles.