It's probably time to explain why I am so resentful about being clumped in with the itinerant nature-monks and desert ascetics who are not so rare in the RV blogosphere. At times it seems that they belong in the Canterbury Tales. Most of them were young adults who were influenced by Earth Day 1970, and are now retirement age.
The irruption of nature-romanticism circa 1970 is one of those recurring fantasies that our civilization is susceptible to. Before Earth Day 1970, nature-romanticism had been in abeyance since the publication of Thoreau's Walden. Naturally young hippies, with little interest in old folks' history, thought they were on to something novel and exciting with their recycled sentiments of the Romantic age. They painted up the VW bus and headed back to the Garden of Eden with just a plastic sheet and some bean and squash seeds, back to an age of innocence and peace when man lived in Harmony with Nature, and shared everything equally.
In its 1970 reincarnation, in Thoreau's Transcendentalism, or even back in Rousseau's time, nature-Romanticism was a post-Christian belief system. "Searchers" weren't really that interested in nature herself; they were looking for a replacement for the Faith that had been emptied of all its blood by the great leech of Enlightenment. From a history book I'm enjoying at the moment,
"Many people came to hold, more or less loosely, something like this Idealist-Romantic position, meaning that we can see God or a higher reality in Nature, actually commune with it, feel its basic kinship with our souls." (An Intellectual History of Modern Europe, Roland Stromberg, Ch. 7, p. 214)
I don't really care for finding a Divine Immanence in a silly forest, but I'll admit that Thoreau's need to do so led to his inspired writing. In contrast I am loyal to a pre-Christian approach to outdoor experience: Epicureanism, the avoidance of Pain and the search for Pleasure.
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