The more intimate you become with nature the more you appreciate its beauty, its beauty that consists not only in sights and sounds but in appreciation of the whole thing. I don’t know how to express it. What is significant is that when you live in the woods rather than just visiting them the beauty becomes part of your life rather than something you just look at from the outside. Part of the intimacy with nature that you acquire is the sharpening of the senses. Not that your hearing and eyesight become more acute but you notice things more. In city life you tend to be turned inward. Your environment is crowded with irrelevant sights and sounds and you just get conditioned to block most of them out of your consciousness. In the woods you get so that your awareness is turned outward towards your environment hence you are much more conscious of what goes on around you. For example you notice inconspicuous things on the ground such as edible plants or animal tracks. If a human being has passed through and has left even just a small part of a footprint you’ll probably notice it. You know what the sounds are that come to your ears. This is a bird call. That is the buzzing of a horsefly. This is a startled deer running off. This is the thump of a pinecone that has been cut down by a squirrel and has landed on a log. If you hear a sound that you can’t identify it immediately catches your attention even if it is so faint it’s barely audible. To me this alertness or openness of one’s senses is one of the greatest luxuries of living close to nature and you can’t understand this unless you’ve experienced it yourself.
Theodore Kaczynski • Stemple Pass dir. James Benning
