I lie in my backyard and gazing into the past, towards the celestial bodies before me. I feel as though I’m upside down, looking into a pool whose edges are beyond my peripheral vision. I want to reach out and grasp the firmament before me; I want to hold the solar system. Astronomy is foreign and indefinite to me, not immediately tangible. I feel that I need to grasp ahold of it through some other method, such as by knowing and understanding it. This inclination worries me, because as John Fowles describes in his essay, The Tree, “Naming things is always implicitly categorizing and therefore collecting them, attempting to own them.” I recognize this inclination as an effort to dominate the cryptic sky before me, as if understanding it will allow me to manipulate and use it in a way that signifies my control over it, the next best thing to actually gripping it with my hands.

This is a dangerous mindset. I know that the feeling of control is something that never fully satisfies; I’ve lived a considerable portion of my life thinking it is, and I’ve learned that it does not fulfill, but inversely, detracts from nearly everything that I do possess. To me, the initial feeling of acquiring is more appealing than its aftermath - actually holding that acquisition - and familiarity so many times becomes synonymous with boredom. Humankind constantly seeks more knowledge. Perhaps we feel such short-lived satisfaction from acquisition. Perhaps if I had not been “so early weaned from [nature’s] breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,” I would more easily find the kind of satisfaction in other aspects of my life that I achieve when I simply watch nature. I want to regain this unlearned kind of appreciation.

Nature fulfills our desire for constant acquisition, whether that desire is innate or has been manmade through consumerism. Over a day, a week, even a month, not much in a landscape seems to change. Over time, however, this landscape will have considerably transformed at a very slow pace - yet to me, watching nature is not boring. Nature is the home and mother of all life and all interactions that can take place between myself and anything else on Earth. The minuscule changes that nature makes are constant and each incredibly fascinating, the tiniest process worthy, in a human’s eyes, of exhaustive research, encyclopedias, and textbooks full of facts and information, photographs, and diagrams. Fowles professes that, “As we watch [nature], it is so to speak rewriting, reformulating, repainting, rephotographing itself.” In nature, we never face the boredom of familiarity that follows the initial thrill of obtaining. We never actually possess nature, except in the faux ownership that endeavors to name, categorize, and manipulate it yield. Therefore, when I lie in the grass and stare up at the welkin ahead, never must I undergo a withdrawal from the sensation of gain. I am constantly gaining simply by surrounding myself with things that constantly change.

In his essay, Walking, Henry David Thoreau theorizes that “It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in ‘Hamlet’ and the ‘Iliad,’ in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us.” While these are works of literary genius, drafted over and over, revised, cut, edited, reassessed, re-examined, reassessed again, these are also a refreshing exploration of the forgotten, savage wildness of the mind that we all resonate with at our core. Our suppressed, barbaric brains seem new to us, and what is new is often exciting. Because this brain is the one we all possessed at birth, “tame” may not have been initially synonymous with “dull.” “Tame” was unexplored when humankind was surrounded with a virgin world, far less adulterated by man than it is now. However, now that much of what we know and are taught is domesticated, trained, and ordered, the slight percentage of Earth untouched by man is entirely wonderful. Thoreau expresses this idea through his preference of a “Dismal Swamp” over “the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived.” Centuries ago, it may have been exotic to see sculpted nature derived from humankind’s artistic eye. Perhaps we embellished the preexisting beauty on Earth too much, and in doing so, eradicated some that went better untouched. Now, the indigenous state of the Earth before man is more uncommon, unique, and therefore, to many, more beautiful.

I feel detached from that which I see. When I look at something, it’s as though there’s some transparent partition between myself and that before me, creating a diminished sense of interaction compared with what I touch, what I smell, what I hear, and what I taste. Despite this feeling, vision is the most expansive of my senses. It works over far greater distances that smell, sound, taste, or touch. I can see miles and miles ahead of me if there aren’t mountains or buildings in my way. Even if there are, I can look to the sky and see incredible lengths ahead of me, looking into the past, the old light whose photons have just arrived. Perhaps this is why I feel divorced from what I watch through the lens of my eyes - I constantly see things that I will never have true interaction with. In Annie Dillard’s Seeing, she describes formerly blind people’s experiences after gaining sight. Dillard notes that when the patients struggle with perceiving depth, “The mental effort involved in these reasonings...oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable.” Vision grants me a far vaster understanding of the magnitude of the universe than any of my other senses could, allowing me to look into the atmosphere and submerge myself into a blue cosmos of infinitude. Vision enables me to have a relationship with nature in one of the most fulfilling ways I can, giving way to both a desire to embrace it as well as forcing me to leave it be.

Even as I argue that we cannot “have” nature, I still feel some desire to hold it, to obtain it. I want to cultivate an unselfish love of nature and apply this attitude to other aspects of my life. With this attitude, I can access a nuanced definition of love, and view it not as word of possession, but rather a word of appreciation. I don’t need to have memorized biological processes or natural chemicals or the anatomy of a caterpillar to be able to watch, appreciate, and love my visual connection to these things. I find an unnerving contradiction between my reverent acceptance of nature and my intention to study science; yet I feel there is a distinction between this hypocrisy and my desire to become a chemist. In my study of science, I hope to learn for my own interest, rather than as an attempt to own space and Earth. I want to indulge in my curiosity whilst being respectful of the absolute sovereignty that the natural world has over me. I wish to achieve both a factual understanding of the world (as much as science can yield) as well as satisfaction with my place in it, and I feel the latter cannot be achieved through knowledge alone. If I want to be a scientist, I must attempt to “[see] without understanding” outside of the laboratory, otherwise I will undoubtedly drive myself mad - not a savage, natural, wild kind of mad, but a type of mad produced by the unruly pressures humans often impose upon themselves. As Annie Dillard remarks, “There is another kind of seeing, which involves a letting go,” and it is this kind of seeing that I believe will keep me healthily sane. I appreciate “vision [as] a deliberate gift” and intend not to abuse this gift with obsessive intellect, but to respect this gift by learning about what I see as much as it benefits and delights me. Accordingly, for my sake as well as its, I must recognize that some things are meant solely to be gazed at from a distance.