Collection 3: "Against Nature" by Joyce Carol Oates

Its pleasures lack resonance, being accidental; its horrors, even when premeditated, are equally perfunctory, “red in tooth and claw,” et cetera.

Its pleasures lack resonance, being accidental; its horrors, even when premeditated, are equally perfunctory, “red in tooth and claw,” et cetera.

When you discover yourself lying on the ground, limp and unresisting, head in the dirt, and, let’s face it, helpless, the earth seems to shift forward as a presence; hard, emphatic, not mere surface but a genuine force—there is no other word for it but presence.

Moving through space and time by way of your own volition you inhabit an interior consciousness, a hallucinatory consciousness, it might be said, so long as breath, heartbeat, the body’s autonomy hold; when motion is stopped you are jarred out of it.

Moving through space and time by way of your own volition you inhabit an interior consciousness, a hallucinatory consciousness, it might be said, so long as breath, heartbeat, the body’s autonomy hold; when motion is stopped you are jarred out of it.

Coming upon a friend’s dog in a drainage ditch, dead for several days, evidently the poor creature had been shot by a hunter and left to die, bleeding to death, and we’re stupefied with grief and horror but can’t resist sliding down to where he’s lying on his belly, and we can’t resist squatting over him, turning the body over.

Nature has no instructions for mankind except that our poor beleaguered humanist-democratic way of life, our fantasies of the individual’s high worth, our sense that the weak, no less than the strong, have a right to survive, are absurd.

Surely Nature is, for you, as for most reasonably intelligent people, a “perennial” source of beauty, comfort, peace, escape from the delirium of civilized life; a respite from the ego’s ever-frantic strategies of self-promotion, as a way of ensuring (at least in fantasy) some small measure of immortality?

Surely Nature is, for you, as for most reasonably intelligent people, a “perennial” source of beauty, comfort, peace, escape from the delirium of civilized life; a respite from the ego’s ever-frantic strategies of self-promotion, as a way of ensuring (at least in fantasy) some small measure of immortality?

Surely Nature, as it is understood in the usual slapdash way, as human, if not dilettante, experience (hiking in a national park, jogging on the beach at dawn, even tending, with the usual comical frustrations, a suburban garden), is wonderfully consoling; a place where, when you go there, it has to take you in?—a palimpsest of sorts you choose to read, layer by layer, always with care, always cautiously, in proportion to your psychological strength?

Surely Nature, as it is understood in the usual slapdash way, as human, if not dilettante, experience (hiking in a national park, jogging on the beach at dawn, even tending, with the usual comical frustrations, a suburban garden), is wonderfully consoling; a place where, when you go there, it has to take you in?—a palimpsest of sorts you choose to read, layer by layer, always with care, always cautiously, in proportion to your psychological strength?

Surely Nature, as it is understood in the usual slapdash way, as human, if not dilettante, experience (hiking in a national park, jogging on the beach at dawn, even tending, with the usual comical frustrations, a suburban garden), is wonderfully consoling; a place where, when you go there, it has to take you in?—a palimpsest of sorts you choose to read, layer by layer, always with care, always cautiously, in proportion to your psychological strength?

Nature: as in Thoreau’s upbeat Transcendentalist mode (“The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected...if any man should ever for a just cause grieve”), and not in Thoreau’s grim mode (“Nature is hard to be overcome but she must be overcome”).

And why not Nature, since it’s there, common property, mute, can’t talk back, allows us the possibility of transcending the human condition for a while, writing prettily of mountain ranges, white-tailed deer, the purple crocuses outside this very window, the thrumming dazzling “life force” we imagine we all support.

Walden, that most artfully composed of prose fictions, concludes, in the rhapsodic chapter “Spring,” with Henry David Thoreau’s contemplation of death, decay, and regeneration as it is suggested to him, or to his protagonist, by the spectacle of vultures feeding off carrion.

But this doctrinaire Transcendentalist passage ends Walden on just the right note. It’s as impersonal, as coolly detached, as the Oversoul itself: a “wise man” filters his emotions through his brain.

Once, years ago, in 1972 to be precise, when I seemed to have been another person, related to the person I am now as one is related tangentially, sometimes embarrassingly, to cousins not seen for decades—once, when we were living in London, and I was very sick, I had a mystical vision.

That is, I “had” a “mystical vision”—the heart sinks: such pretension—or something resembling one. A fever dream, let’s call it.

I was very sick, and I imagined my life as a thread, a thread of breath, or heartbeat, or pulse, or light—yes, it was light, radiant light; I was burning with fever and I ascended to that plane of serenity that might be mistaken for (or is, in fact) Nirvana, where I had a waking dream of uncanny lucidity...

I was very sick, and I imagined my life as a thread, a thread of breath, or heartbeat, or pulse, or light—yes, it was light, radiant light; I was burning with fever and I ascended to that plane of serenity that might be mistaken for (or is, in fact) Nirvana, where I had a waking dream of uncanny lucidity...

But here come the black ants: harbingers, you might say, of spring.

One by one by one they appear on the dazzling white table and one by one I kill them with a forefinger, my deft right forefinger, mashing each against the surface of the table and then dropping it into a wastebasket at my side.