Page 56 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

n
nature 1357
a
1357
ture

Anne Bridge (Lady O’Malley): Peking Picnic

Ann Bridge (Lady O’Malley) was a diplomat’s wife in over the Chinese countryside, finding no resting place.
the 1930s and became a popular novelist. Her first She remembered how alien at first had seemed these
book, Peking Picnic, is a romantic story set in the city dusty flat fields, unmarked by hedge or tree, and the
of Peking (Beijing) and the temple complex T’an Chüeh prevailing brown tone of the landscape; how unnat-
Ssu. The story takes place during a time when war- ural the sharpness of outlines in crystal-dry air; the
lords were battling for control of China and the Com- vivid color of far-off mountain shapes—the soft aque-
munists were beginning to gain power.This extract re- ous blue of distances in a moist climate.The stylized
flects on the difference between European and Chinese formal beauty of it she had seen once—what had
perceptions of nature: been lacking was beauty in familiarity, the richness of
association entwined with sights and scents, going
The delicate strange beauty of the whole landscape
back through the quiet swing of the seasons to the
struck powerfully on her senses, rousing her to an
enormous days and tiny pleasures of childhood, go-
active delight. What was the quality in this Chinese
ing back deeper and further still, blood of her English
scene which so moved her, she wondered? She re-
blood and bone of her English bone, to the very roots
membered with curious distinctness the distress she
of life. Cut off from all that, planted down in a life as
had felt during the first months of her sojourn in Pek-
strange as the world she looked upon, she had wilted
ing at the sheer unfamiliarity of the face of Nature.
within like an uprooted plant. She could still remem-
Her mind, accustomed to draw nourishment from
ber her own astonishment at the depth of her dis-
the well-known scenes of England, the great elms
tress, at finding how much the spirit depends for its
standing round the quiet fields, the broad sweep of
strength on the changing but familiar beauty without,
distant downs, the white roads winding over the de
the face of the earth, the changeful face of the sky.
Wint-like sky lines, dotted with rick and barn, to the
Source: Bridge,A. (1960). Peking Picnic (pp. 91–92). Pleasantville, NY: The Akadine Press.
huddle of red village roofs, had ranged eagerly, vainly,

History of Primitivism, Arthur O. Lovejoy’s study of nature you will—and impounding them under a single name; in
in Greek and Roman history, outlines the birth of the fact, of regarding Everything as a thing, turning this amor-
concept.The word natura meant “genesis, birth, origin.” phous and heterogeneous collection into an object or
The Greek poet Homer (c. 700 BCE), in providing a phys- pseudo-object” (Lewis 1967, 35, 37). Clarence Glacken,
ical description of an herb, also provided its character, its in his Traces on the Rhodian Shore, reviews the force of
“nature.” To the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (524–456 the design argument in the history of nature from its
BCE), “nature” referred to visible characteristics that are emergence as early as the Greek historian Herodotus
assumed to be innate. The contrast between reality (484–425 BCE) through the seventeenth century CE.Tele-
(nature) and appearance occurred as well. For example, ological (relating to design or purpose) conceptions of
the pre-Socratic philosophers distinguished between the the “purposefulness in the creation—that it was the result
appearance of a couch and the true nature of a couch— of intelligent, planned, and well-thought-out acts of a cre-
the wood from which it is constructed. During this ator,” including a sense of the fitness of nature to human
period people also came to think of nature as the entire needs, have been important in Western constructions of
cosmic system and its laws. nature (Glacken 1967, 39).
The English writer C. S. Lewis in his Studies in Words From its beginning then the word nature referred to the
writes: “A comparatively small number of speculative whole material world and to intrinsic form and creative
Greeks invented Nature—Nature with a capital.” This forces. One meaning of the word nature was enfolded
invention required “taking all things they knew or be- within another. During the fourteenth century nature as
lieved in—gods, men, animals, plants, minerals, what “the essential quality or character of something” took on