A chrestomathy is a collection of literary passages sometimes used to study literature. This one I’ve been keeping for the past ten years or so.

Basho:

O bush warblers!
Now you’ve shit all over
my rice cake on the porch.
(translated by Sam Hamill)

Merrill Gilfillan:

And (Carl) mentioned a show of paintings on the American West he had visited last winter that illustrated the deep roots of the false commercial image. He estimated that 40 percent of the pictures hung were near nonsensical, rumor-based, dreamed up and distorted by either distance (as in Europe) or romantic notions of exotica and its ready market.

It is a subject much written upon. What is endlessly striking, though, is the extent to which such atomized distraction can in the end come very close to undercutting, eating away, the original referent on which it based its two-dimensional wares, until the entire subject is widely greeted with the wateriest of grins.

There were many things more solid and more pleasant on the landscape as we drove. The discussion simply made us wonder out loud a little about validity, continuum, duration on this vulnerable continent and in the West after the century of “Hollywood” and the great filmic gullibility, and just what difficult-to-imagine mentality might be afoot in another fifty years, vaporous fruit of a generation who inherited what students of the field call a chronically “simulation infested” landscape. (from his essay “A Black Hills Loop” in Rivers & Birds)

Robert Frost:

But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing. (from his poem The Oven Bird)

Aldo Leopold:

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology.

David Wroblewski:

Outside, the world became a riot of vegetable odors, boggy and florid—the waft of old hay, tamarack, algae, moss, sweet sap and rotted leaves, iron and copper and worms—a musky yawn that hung in the yard. (from his novel The Story of Edgar Sawtelle)

Paul Gruchow:

…once we build beyond a human scale, once we conceive ourselves as Titans or as gods, we are lost in magnitude; we cannot control or limit what we do…

Many landscapes, I suppose, are more beautiful than mine, but beauty is not everything in a landscape, any more than it is in a face. (All from his essay The Grace of the Wild)

Rick Bass:

For wildness to survive, for wildness to return, reverence must also return. Not so much knowledge, but more understanding. Respect, awareness, caution; providence, prudence, compassion—what sounds like a shopping list for the Quakers, perhaps, is really more of a checklist of the wild. (from The Lost Grizzlies)

William Stafford:

The wilderness which seems something we get lost in is really a place we belong. It’s a mistake to stay only within human society with your attention. (From the video The Life of the Poem)

Basho:

Your song caresses
the depths of loneliness,
high mountain bird.
(translated by Sam Hamill)

Jim Harrison:

…the shock of being lost as a metaphor is the discovery that you’ve never been “found” in any meaningful sense. When you’re lost you know who you are. You’re the only one out there. (From his essay Passacaglia on Getting Lost )

Frederick Sommer:

Some speak of a return to nature, I wonder where they could have been.

Merrill Gilfillan:

…there are two sorts of contemplation/meditation: one that seeks to ‘escape’ the world, float free high above, and one that seeks to engage the world, its details, and follow them to their transcendent implicative plane—the Full Attention serving as an ‘organ’ as crucial as a foot or lung. (Chokecherry Places)

Of all landscapes the open plain is the one of Possibility. Driving it is over and over a prow to ride, a cutting edge where fresh words surface and the mind is washed and hung. (Magpie Rising)

I remember reading as a child, curled on a sofa, stories of the plains tribes by the hour. There was the narrative excitement, of course, but what lingered, I see now, what took root and ripened, the geographic word softly detonating and filling the head till my inner ear roared as of conch shell.

Thus a geography not one’s own forms in the mind, firms on a lattice of pregnant place names. It is a private mythic geography that interlocks with one’s past through the most intimate means, the language.

On the plains, “where place names are widely scattered,” the toponym is heavily loaded to begin with by virtue of its high relief. But to come up against the actuality behind one of those names throwing echoes to a book devoured in 1957 in the wooded midwest is a lustrous event. The magical names beckon and when you find them in their places, simply and solidly there as always, they are familiar as a childhood object.

It is the closing of a long-open loop to set foot, 30 years later, on the Judith Mountains or the bone-dry Arikaree River or dozens of other spots of ground with names worn smooth by years of quiet subconscious surf. It is tribute to the place and to the original young head that incubated and held the words. It is pilgrimage most fruitfully made only after that unmistakable time when one’s childhood sets as a distant and topographically distinct world, continually receding from that point on, a rumor-misted far-flung province to be handled, governed, bartered with, visited on high occasions, entertained…. (Magpie Rising)

Mari Sandoz:

It was not like the world the boy knew but the real world behind this one, the sky and the trees in it, the grass waving, but all in a strange and sacred way. (Crazy Horse, The Strange Man of the Oglalas)

…looking for the breath cloud of a buffalo herd… (same as above)

Wallace Stegner:

Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value. Roads would be a desecration, crowds would ruin it. But those who haven’t the strength or youth to go into it and live can simply sit and look. They can look 200 miles, clear into Colorado; and looking down over the cliffs and canyons of the San Rafael Swell and the Robber’s Roost they can also look as deeply into themselves as anywhere I know.

Jim Hepworth:

In other words, as Stegner fully realized, the conscious recesses and subconscious deeps of our minds are wilderness areas. (One Way To Spell Man)

Wes Jackson:

We may have colonized this continent, but we have not yet discovered it.

Louis Jenkins:

There is only one true wilderness left to explore, those vast empty spaces in your head. (Blue, Blue Day in his book The Winter Road)

Stanley Kunitz:

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him.

Aldo Leopold:

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot. (Sand County Almanac)

…our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. (Sand County Almanac)

To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. (Round River)

Issa:

This snow on the bed quilt—
this too
is from the Pure Land.
(The Winged Energy of Delight, translations by Robert Bly. Said to be his last poem)

Paul Gruchow:

…if God exists, then, to use Wendell Berry’s phrase, “He is the wildest being in Creation.” (The Grace of the Wild)

Peter Leschak:

After all, one can revel in striking sunsets from a skyscraper in downtown Minneapolis. In Sigurd Olson’s mind, however, there had to be a place where one could decisively drop out of the modern technological network; a place where you couldn’t hear a car, a skidder, or an aircraft; a place where you could be assured you were surrounded by many thousands of acres of untrammeled land, water, sky. There is a time for isolation. Sometimes it requires a huge mass of quiet before you can hear anything. There must be a sanctuary, a natural archive for the preservation of the ancient states of things. It’s a question not only of ecology, biological diversity, and the health of the biosphere, but also of our heritage and the health of our minds. (Seeing the Raven)

Sigurd Olson:

At times on quiet waters one does not speak aloud but only in whispers, for then all noise is sacrilege.

Merrill Gilfillan again:

There is still the space so powerful as to render time silly. (Magpie Rising)

Joseph M. Marshall III:

Anything in the hand didn’t have to be given the power to change what was in the mind and in the heart. And that, he understood, was at the root of many fears, that the essence of being Lakota could be so easily changed by new and different things. It made no sense. (The Journey of Crazy Horse)

Gilfillan:

Both traditions share the irreplaceable knowledge that the secret heart and law of the earth is not only discovered, but maintained and nourished through earth-grounded song and tale. The land is seen as a narrative interacting with the human imagination, an ‘artifact of intellect’ to be studied and read. (Chokecherry Places)

Gruchow:

The prairie teaches us that the work that matters doesn’t always show…. The prairie is bountifully utilitarian. But it is lovely too, in a hundred thousand ways and in a million details, many of them so finely wrought that one must drop to one’s knees to appreciate them. This is what, over all else, the prairie teaches us: there need be no contradiction between utility and beauty. (Grass Roots)

Barry Lopez:

We tend to think of places like the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Gobi, the Sahara, the Mojave, as primitive, but there are in fact no primitive or even primeval landscapes. Neither are there permanent landscapes. And nowhere is the land empty or underdeveloped. It cannot be improved upon with technological assistance. The land, an animal that contains all other animals, is vigorous and alive. The challenge to us, when we address the land, is to join with cosmologists in their ideas of continuous creation, and with physicists with their ideas of the spatial and temporal paradox, to see the subtle grace and mutability of different landscapes. (Arctic Dreams)

Jim Harrison:

The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense. The discounted sociologist Jared Schmitz, who was packed off from Harvard to a minor religious college in Missouri before earning tenure when a portion of his doctoral dissertation was proven fraudulent, stated that in a culture in the seventh stage of rabid consumerism the peripheral always subsumes the core, and the core disappears to the point that very few of the citizenry can recall its precise nature. (The Beast God Forgot To Invent)

Paul Gruchow:

It is an odd irony that the places we call empty should retain some memory of the diversity of life, while the places we have filled up grow emptier and emptier. (The Necessity of Empty Places)

Barry Lopez:

What is the point at which the “tragic” loneliness of an individual, which drives him toward accomplishment, no longer effectively leads but confounds the well-being of the larger society? And what will be the disposition of the landscape? Will it be used, always, in whatever way we will, or will it one day be accorded some dignity of its own? And, finally, what does the nature of the heroic become, once the landscape is threatened? (Arctic Dreams)

Edward Abbey:

All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred. (Desert Solitaire)