ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
At the heart of Cooper’s project is a desire to bring to the reader’s attention how
profound and inspiring the natural world can be when experienced through a certain
kind of grateful awareness. Each person will no doubt be able to recall his own
treasured exemplar of such an experience. Mine heralds from Cooper’s own beautiful
county, Northumberland, and especially its tiny rural fishing village of Craster.
Looking along the shore, you can see the craggy ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle
shimmering against the misty sky ahead, with sheep grazing on bright green pastures
below, while the North sea, the colour of grey glass, is flecked with white threads as it
surges against rugged black rocks where the land slopes away. There is something
perennially life-enhancing about that scene, and Cooper’s book seeks to explain why.
2. Oneness and ephemerality.
Nature’s profundity doesn’t shine through only in places of wilderness – it can
happen, Cooper notes, in any encounter with animals, plants and natural places,
including “humanised” (CN: 8) or “cultivated environments” (CN: 119) such as farms
and parks. What all these have in common is that our experience of them can be
enhanced – whether deliberately or epiphanically – by a mood of “convergence.” In
this mood, Cooper explains, we see nature in a certain light. Above all, in the very act
of recognising nature as a single object of awareness, we see its “oneness” (CN: 68).
We realise that everything is indelibly linked to everything else – in “an
interconnected whole” (CN: 53). To be sure, this is a far-reaching realisation, yet it is
deep, not superficial. It points us to the core of all things, to what they share.
Yet what we discover at these depths is “ephemerality” (CN: 96); that all objects and
life-forms must end up “dissolving” (CN: 53). A Schopenhauerian would say that we
encounter in nature a scene of conflict, a battlefield wherein all things compete for a
fleeting existence; a more sanguine commentator might observe a harmonious scene
of mutual dependencies, wherein nothing can exist without sustenance, inevitably
finite, from without. Cooper eschews anthropomorphic stances like these (CN: 96101), noting simply that nature exhibits the “temporary character of all life,” and our
experience of this fact is “tempered by sorrow” (CN: 96).
When it comes to my own experience of nature, I can certainly vouch for such
“melancholic sensitivity” (CN: 96). So strong is the connection between Cr