[DOWNLOAD] "Deer Park (Essay)" by Northwest Review * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

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eBook details

• Title: Deer Park (Essay)
• Author : Northwest Review
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 54 KB

Description

At the end of a rainy sleepless night, I'm out of the house armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, heading up through the hemlock woods to the garden. While I've been busy with an early harvest and devising ways to keep critters out of the fall seedlings, I've ignored the larger life around me, including the hemlocks, my companions most of my life. This dank morning the forest seems particularly alien to me. That line from the old song, "I talk to the trees but they don't listen to me," suggests a ridiculous egotism I hope I don't represent here. But it hits the bull's eye for me: I hear the trees talking in low whispering tones, but my talking to them is, well, inconsequential. The northern forest has always been considered a holy place. German theologian Rudolph Otto maps out the aesthetics of it in his book The Idea of the Holy. "The semi-darkness that glimmers in vaulted halls or beneath the branches of a lofty forest glade, strangely quickened and stirred by the mysterious play of half-lights, has always spoken eloquently to the soul." Otto says that to have a mystical effect the forest darkness must contrast with a flickering or dying light. But I wonder if what we dub "mystical"--the mysterium tremendum experienced in old-growth forests--isn't just the awe of contemplating primordial survivors. The hemlocks around my garden aren't so much relics of that past as ghosts of it. And if ghosts are memories floating loose from bodies of the dead who once owned them, then these trees carry memories of long-gone snowstorms and blistering droughts beyond written history.

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