Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  34. “surrounded him as a kind of nimbus”: Lawrence F. Abbott, Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1919), p. 267. Abbott also said that no individual “in modern times touched so many and so varied fields of activity in human life with such zest and vitality” (p. 266).

  35. “fully intended to make science my life-work”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, p. 26.

  36. Native bison herds were decimated: Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Naturalist (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 2.

  37. “Ever since man”: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Conservation of Wild Life,” The Outlook, January 20, 1915, in Works, National Edition, vol. 12, p. 424.

  38. “There can be no greater issue”: Theodore Roosevelt, “A Confession of Faith,” address to the National Convention of the Progressive Party, August 6, 1912, in Works, National Edition, vol. 17, pp. 293–94.

  39. “He is doubtless the most vital man”: John Burroughs, Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), pp. 60–61. Another friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, said shortly after Roosevelt died: “He touched a subject and it suddenly began to glow as when the high-power electric current touches the metal and the white light starts forth and dazzles the onlooking eyes. We know the air played by the Pied Piper of Hamelin no better than we know why Theodore Roosevelt thus drew the interest of men after him. We only know they followed wherever his insatiable activity of mind invited them.” Address of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in Honor of Theodore Roosevelt, Before the Congress of the United States, February 9, 1919 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 44.

  40. “there would be little ground left”: quoted in Miller, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 470.

  41. “During the seven and a half years”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, pp. 434–35.

  42. “Wild beasts and birds”: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Conservation of Wild Life,” in Works, National Edition, vol. 12, pp. 423–31; quote on p. 425.

  43. “A grove of giant redwoods”: Theodore Roosevelt, A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (New York: Scribners, 1923); published in Works, vol. 4, p. 227.

  44. “It is not the critic who counts”: Roosevelt, Works, vol. 13, pp. 506–29.

  45. “When I was a boy in Scotland”: John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, in The Wilderness Journeys (1913; Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), pp. 1, 23.

  46. “flying to the woods”: ibid., p. 130.

  47. “My eyes never closed”: ibid.

  48. “University of the Wilderness”: ibid., p. 132.

  49. “glorious botanical and geological excursion”: ibid. Muir said that the excursion, looking back on it, “lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free … urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty” (ibid.).

  50. “glowing with Heaven’s unquenchable enthusiasm”: John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, in The Wilderness Journeys (1911; Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), pp. 59, 63.

  51. “Our camp grove fills”: ibid., p. 71.

  52. “joyful, wonderful, enchanting”: ibid., p. 90.

  53. “I shouted and gesticulated”: ibid., p. 66.

  54. “Exhilarated with the mountain air”: ibid., p. 51.

  55. “rocking and swirling”: John Muir, “A Wind-Storm in the Forest,” in John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: Modern Library, 2001), p. 183; first published as “A Wind Storm in the Forest of the Yuba,” Scribner’s Monthly, November 1878.

  56. “so noble an exhilaration of motion”: ibid.

  57. “Muir at once went wild”: Samuel Hall Young, Alaska Days with John Muir, in John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings, ed. T. Gifford (London: Bâton Wicks, 1996), p. 627. Alaska Days was first published in 1915.

  58. “I feel as if driven”: Letter from John Muir to Sarah Muir Galloway, February 26, 1875, in Gifford, Life and Letters, pp. 215–16.

  59. “Every summer my gains”: Letter from John Muir to Louie Wanda Strentzel, October 1879, ibid., p. 249.

  60. “Do behold the King”: Letter from John Muir to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, n.d. [probably 1870], ibid., pp. 139–40.

  61. “There is a balm”: ibid., p. 140.

  62. “He sung the glory of nature”: Robert Underwood Johnson, quoted ibid., p. 873. (“John Muir as I Knew Him,” talk given before the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, January 6, 1916.)

  63. “Muir was always discovering”: Young, Alaska Days, p. 647.

  64. “How often have I longed for”: ibid., p. 678.

  65. “To have explored with Muir”: Charles Keeler, “Recollections of John Muir,” in Gifford, Life and Letters, p. 880.

  66. Muir’s was the most original mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Graham White’s introduction to The Wilderness Journeys, p. vi.

  67. “spell of fire and enthusiasm”: Marion Randall Parsons, “John Muir and the Alaska Book,” Sierra Club Bulletin, 10: 33–34 (1916). Theodore Roosevelt also commented on Muir’s verbal persuasiveness: “John Muir talked even better than he wrote. His greatest influence was always upon those who were brought into close personal contact with him.” Quoted in Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981), p. 126.

  68. “I write to you personally”: Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to John Muir, 1903, quoted in Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), p. 247.

  69. “I had a perfectly glorious time”: Letter from John Muir to his wife, in William Frederic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), vol. 2, p. 412.

  70. “I fairly fell in love with him”: Letter from John Muir to C. Hart Merriam, ibid.

  71. “I trust I need not tell you”: quoted in Cutright, Making of a Conservationist, pp. 115–16.

  72. an additional sense of urgency: On Muir’s death, Roosevelt said “he was also—what few nature-lovers are—a man able to influence contemporary thought and action on the subjects to which he had devoted his life. He was a great factor in influencing the thought of California and the thought of the entire country so as to secure the preservation of those great natural phenomena—wonderful canyons, giant trees, slopes of flower-spangled hillsides.… [O]ur generation owes much to John Muir” (January 6, 1915). Roosevelt, Works, vol. 12. p. 566.

  73. “I have just come from”: Badè, Life and Letters of John Muir, p. 376.

  74. “Any fool can destroy trees”: Gifford, Life and Letters, pp. 372–73.

  75. wilderness was a necessity: John Muir, quoted in Gretel Ehrlich, John Muir: Nature’s Visionary (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2000), p. 131. “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity.”

  76. “lies the hope of the world”: Quoted in Frederick Turner, John Muir: Rediscovering America (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), p. 290. Thoreau had said “in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.” Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau (New York: North Point Press, 2002), p. 162; essay first published in 1862.

  77. “The galling harness”: Turner, John Muir, p. 290.

  78. “All of us who give service”: Roosevelt, Works, vol. 11, p. 267.

  79. “I only went out for a walk”: Turner, John Muir, p. 350.

  Chapter 2: “This Wonderful Loveliness”

  1. One pair of poppies: The figures for poppies and spiders come from an outstanding educational exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London, Origins of Species Gallery, June 2000.

  2. The fertility and diversity of nature: For an excellent discussion, see Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap
Press, 1992).

  “The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation,” writes Annie Dillard. “After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusion on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 9.

  3. 1,500 species of butterfly: Wilson, Diversity of Life, pp. 185–86.

  4. Lichens, among nature’s oldest: For information about lichens, I relied upon two excellent books: Oliver Gilbert, Lichens (London: HarperCollins, 2000); and Irwin M. Brodo, Sylvia Duran Sharnoff, and Stephen Sharnoff, Lichens of North America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).

  5. “endless forms most beautiful”: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859; New York: Random House, 1993), p. 649. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” wrote Darwin, “with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” (pp. 648–49).

  6. a million and a half species of fungi: Global Biodiversity Assessment, United Nations Environment Program, 2002. The structure of underlying genetic material is likewise diverse in number and complexity. The human genome has 3 billion DNA base pairs, for instance, but a trumpet lily has 90 billion and an amoeba 670 billion. Clearly the number of base pairs alone does not determine functional complexity, but the range of numbers and the structural diversity of life forms is a reminder of the variety of life evolved by nature. See Jonathan Knight, “All Genomes Great and Small,” Nature, 417: 374–76 (2002).

  7. more than a million species of bacteria: Recently, the molecular biologist Craig Venter discovered at least 1,800 new species of microbes and more than a million previously unknown genes while sampling water from the Sargasso Sea. Andrew Pollack, “Groundbreaking Gene Scientist Is Taking His Craft to the Oceans,” New York Times, March 5, 2004.

  8. “green cathedral”: Wilson, Diversity of Life, p. 184.

  9. “How deeply with beauty”: John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, in The Wilderness Journeys (1913; Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), p. 74.

  10. the thickness of the starfields: God, said Milton, had “sowed with stars the Heaven thick as a field.” John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VII.

  11. Astronomers live among numbers: Astronomers reported at a January 2004 meeting of the American Astronomical Society that 3 billion years after the Big Bang a string of galaxies 300 million light-years long and 50 million light-years wide—a string that would be 2,000 billion billion miles long—had already formed. Kenneth Chang, “New-found Old Galaxies Upsetting Astronomers’ Long-held Theories on the Big Bang,” New York Times, January 8, 2004.

  12. at least 1021 stars: The estimate for the number of stars is relatively consistent and is backed up by data from the Hubble Space Telescope (Stephen Telliet, Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, personal communication). Estimates of the number of galaxies range more widely, but recent data from the Hubble Space Telescope give a number of 125 billion. (The Hubble has allowed astronomers to see farther into space and thus locate more galaxies than previously thought.)

  13. The Milky Way alone: A white dwarf star fifty light-years from Earth is estimated to contain 10 billion trillion trillion carats. T. S. Metcalfe, M. H. Montgomery, A. Kanaan, “Testing White Dwarf Crystallization Theory with Asteroseismology of the Massive Pulsating DA Star BPM 37093,” paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, February 2, 2004; Guy Gugliotta, “White Dwarf Star Is a Girl’s Best Friend,” Washington Post, February 14, 2004.

  14. 1041 … grams of diamond dust: Science, 296: 1397 (2002).

  15. “Of mingled blossoms”: James Thomson, The Seasons (1726–30; New York: Frederick A. Stokes & Brother, 1889), pp. 21, 25.

  16. “central theater of life”: Edward Hoagland, introduction to Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. v.

  17. “bens and glens of stars”: Robert Crawford, “From the Top,” The Tip of My Tongue (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), p. 37.

  18. “Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades?”: Job 38: 31–32.

  19. “Who publishes the sheet-music”: Turner, John Muir, p. 233.

  20. “In the presence of nature”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Nature and Walking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), pp. 7–8. “Nature” first published in 1836.

  21. landmark study of ecstasy: Marghanita Laski, Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (London: Cresset Press, 1961).

  22. “fashioned for himself”: James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 465; abridgment, first published in 1922.

  23. “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring,” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 67.

  24. Our vitalities change: Oyano Atotsugi has written:

  No matter how tight

  the stitches are pulled

  they are rent asunder

  as the plum bursts into bloom

  and the warbler bursts into song.

  Quoted in Charlotte van Rappard-Boon, Poetry and Image in Japanese Prints (Leiden: Hotei Publishing, 2000), p. 61.

  25. “The brooks sing carols”: Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), p. 290. First published in Boston by Ticknor & Fields, 1854.

  26. “Walden was dead”: ibid., p. 291 “So our human life but dies down to its root,” wrote Thoreau, “and still puts forth its green blade to eternity” (ibid.).

  27. “I am the great Sun”: John Heath-Stubbs, “Canticle of the Sun: Dancing on Easter Morning,” in Collected Poems: 1943–1987 (Manchester, U.K.: Carcanet, 1988), p. 333. Sir John Suckling, in his “Ballad Upon a Wedding,” had written more than three hundred years earlier: “But oh, she dances such a way, / No sun upon an Easter day / Is half so fine a sight.”

  28. darkness covered the land: Matthew 27:45, “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over the land unto the ninth hour.”

  29. “There was only—spring itself”: Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918; New York: Signet, 1994), p. 116.

  30. “The earth / Puts forth”: Langston Hughes, “In Time of Silver Rain,” in Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage, 1959), p. 56.

  31. “With the sunshine”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926; London: Penguin, 1950), pp. 9–10.

  32. “the dark night wakes”: Phillips Brooks, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” in The English Hymnal (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), p. 14.

  33. “When we try to pick out anything”: Muir, First Summer, p. 91

  34. “The vastness of the heavens”: Richard Feynman, M. L. Sands, and R. B. Leighton, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 1 (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994).

  35. “Amazed and thrilled”: Wilson A. Bentley, “Forty Years’ Study of Snow Crystals,” Monthly Weather Review, 52: 530–32 (1924).

  36. “The deeper one enters”: Wilson A. Bentley, “The Latest Designs in Snow and Frost Architecture,” The American Annual of Photography, 20: 166–70 (1906).

  37. “it was the snowflakes that fascinated me”: Mary B. Mullet, “Snowflake Bentley,” The American Magazine, February 1925.

  38. “I found that snowflakes”: ibid. The study of the structure of snow crystals goes back at least to the second century before Christ. The oldest record of Chinese investigations of snowflakes was made by Han Ying about 135 B.c.: “Flowers of plants and trees are generally five-pointed, but those of snow … are always six-pointed.” Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen, “The Earliest Snow Crystal Observations, Weather, 16: 312–27 (1961).

  39. “W
hen a snowflake melted”: Mullet, “Snowflake Bentley.”

  40. “a wonderful little splinter of ice”: ibid. Bentley’s interviewer reports: “ ‘That was a tragedy!’ he said, shaking his head mournfully. ‘In spite of my carefulness, the crystal was broken in transferring it to the slide.’ His voice actually shook with emotion. ‘It makes me almost cry, even now,’ he said, as if he were speaking of the death of a friend.”

  41. “great desire to show”: ibid.

  42. “Perhaps they come to us”: Wilson A. Bentley, “The Wonders and Beauties of Snow,” Christian Herald, March 2, 1904.

  43. “How full of the creative genius”: Henry David Thoreau, H. D. Thoreau: A Writer’s Journal, selected and ed. Laurence Stapleton (New York: Dover, 1960), p. 134.

  44. he who is too much a master: Interestingly, Matthew Cobb suggests in an essay in Nature that scientists have become too objective in recent times: “Science is, after all, about communication. Would the objectivity and precision of the modern scientific article really suffer if we were to express just a fragment of our feelings about our work?” Matthew Cobb, “Wondrous Order,” Nature, 413: 779 (2001).

  45. Bentley used the words “beauty” or “beautiful”: Wilson A. Bentley, “Studies Among the Snow Crystals During the Winter in 1901–2,” Monthly Weather Review, 30: 607–16 (1902).

  46. “I assume that the configurations”: ibid.

  47. the definitive biography: Duncan C. Blanchard, The Snowflake Man: A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley (Blacksburg, Va.: McDonald & Woodard, 1998).

  48. Sir Galahad’s for the Holy Grail: “Bentley returned again and again to this idea of ‘the one preeminently beautiful snow crystal.’ It haunted him long after his search for scientific understanding had diminished.” Personal correspondence from Duncan Blanchard to the author, September 12, 2000.

  49. “preeminently beautiful” snow crystal: Bentley, “Studies Among the Snow Crystals.” “It is extremely improbable that anyone has as yet found, or, indeed, ever will find, the one preeminently beautiful and symmetrical snow crystal that nature has probably fashioned when in her most artistic mood” (p. 616).