I don’t mean to romanticize the peasant’s life. I have seen it too close to believe that it is a blessed existence spent in communion with a bountiful land. It is a tough way of living, much harsher than mine, and I wouldn’t in a million years want to swap my early-twenty-first-century urban life for the rural life of a mid-twentieth-century Italian peasant. I am grateful to those who came before for giving me the chance not to break my back in the fields day in, day out.
But there is a downside. Reasonably competent as I am in urban society, I am useless in the muddy, bloody, non-human world. I could not build a wall, prune a vine or coppice a hazel; I would have no idea how to set about hunting quail or butchering a pig. I am like one of those insects that specialize in doing one thing and one thing only – in my case, moving in a human-made setting. Such insects thrive as long as absolutely everything stays the same, but when you change the smallest aspect of their environment, they die. I can feed myself in an urban setting, but leave me in a deer-filled forest for a week, and you will see my bleached bones.
Nonno Arcangelo could not articulate his connection to the land, because he did not need to. That connection was a self-evident fact, necessary to his own survivaclass="underline" I don’t think he had any notion of ‘nature’ resembling ours. He had to know what kind of weather was coming and how to act accordingly, what parasites were attacking his vineyard and how to dispatch them for good. He had to know how to get through winter when the harvest was poor. He and his family depended on nature as much as they depended on other people. There was a seamless connectedness between his relationship with the land and that of, say, a goat: they both got their food from the same source. And there was a connectedness between his relationship with the friends he played cards with and with the vineyards he grafted: he listened to the vineyards as much as he listened to his friends. He lived in a quietly harmonious cosmos.
By and large, we have removed ourselves from that cosmos. We depend on supermarkets to satisfy our hunger, on a regular salary to pay for a roof over our head. Our most intense relationships are with banks, offices, air-conditioned shops, all human-made objects, rather than grazing animals, olive groves and hailstorms that might damage our crops. We are all specialized insects. Most people I know have never seen an animal being killed; to them (and to me, unless I make an effort to recall hazy memories of my grandfather’s world) a ‘chicken’ is born dead, clean and wrapped in cling film. We say that the flavour of game is an acquired taste, but to my father as a boy it was the way meat tasted, because if he wanted to eat something that was alive, he had to kill the quail or the rabbit himself. There is no denying that the world we have built allows us to do a thousand marvellous things – to advance medical research, to send peasant children to university, to study philosophy. But we have forgotten that most of the world was not built by us. To admit this is not to belittle what we have created.
All humans, from all cultures, posit a boundary of sorts between themselves and what they call ‘nature’. Nonno Arcangelo was of course very well aware that he was not a goat and that there was a difference between a human friend and a vineyard. This boundary though is permeable, ever-shifting, for human life and the natural world are intimately connected to one another. That is still the case and it cannot be otherwise, but we don’t see it any more, and the soft, penetrable boundary has become a high wall, with razor wire on top and armed guards policing it. We believe that there is no relationship at all between goats and us, except for the fact that we eat their meat. That they are animals, and we are not.
Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest welcome the first salmon of the season with all the pomp of a state visit. The salmon is caught, presented to the tribe, spoken to with as much dignity and respect as if it were a political leader – even sung to. After personally addressing the salmon, a priest shares the salmon’s meat with the rest of the tribe, being very careful not to damage the skeleton, which he gives back to the river at the end of the ceremony. It is important that the skeleton is not damaged, because from that skeleton the salmon will return to life, and he will go back to his hidden home, where he will be human once again. According to their tradition, all salmon are also human, belonging to a tribe that lives elsewhere, and when the season is right, they transform themselves into fish so as to feed the other tribes. You must, therefore, show gratitude to the salmon, and not offend him, or he might not return.
The American scholar Lewis Hyde describes this ceremony as an example of ‘a gift relationship with nature’.2 These tribes do not set themselves apart from the wild world of fish and river: they believe (they know) that the salmon is very much like them. Their society and their economy are based upon gifts given and gifts received, so it makes perfect sense for them to extend the courtesy to salmon. They treat ‘nature’ the same way they treat each other.
We have forgotten that we are of the same nature as the salmon. The word ‘animal’ is an insult to us, a slur we slap on our enemies to ‘dehumanize’ them. But animals are exactly what we are (the word ultimately derives from the Latin animalis, meaning ‘having breath’). Ideally, ‘you are an animal’ should be a compliment we pay to other humans; the right answer would be, ‘thank you, yes, you too’. The story of the salmon becoming human (or, better, of the human becoming salmon) encapsulates a profound truth about our place in the world – that we are an animal among animals, a truth that science has confirmed and society has brushed under the carpet. We will never become better listeners to the natural world without recognizing this. Our brain is an animal brain, our nervous system is an animal nervous system, we have animal instincts, fears and hormones, and animal needs for comfort. Some animals have longer lifespans than us; some live more sensuous lives. We are far more intelligent than any other animal on this planet, true, but, to be honest, we decided what is ‘intelligence’ and what it is for, so the argument by which intelligence gives us a superior status is too circular to be of any value.
You can believe that there is something special about us humans (I do, on good days), but that does not change the fact that we are just another organic part of the same world of salmon and vineyard, rather than external masters hovering above it, with rights of life and death over its denizens. As the American poet and ecologist Gary Snyder has put it, ‘nature is not a place to visit, it is home’.3 When Paola and I got lost in the forest, I had a glimpse of home. It made me long to find my way back there.
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Most people satisfy their desire to return to nature by means of travel (another name for tourism). A multi-billion pound industry has developed around this very basic longing. After all, if nature is ‘out there’, it makes sense to go out there looking for nature.
Or not. Travel is pleasant, and it can teach us a lot, but it is unlikely to take us to the place Gary Snyder described as home: you can trek in Yellowstone, swim off Phuket, or fly in a hot-air balloon, and you will have a splendid time, but you will still be visiting. You will still take yourself with you, and as your balloon drifts gently across the sky you will be plotting your counter-attack to the crafty move that Pedro from Finance is surely planning right at this moment. I have met many obsessive travellers whose Instagram feeds are more interesting than their conversation.
The American author Annie Dillard wrote, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a travelogue about her immediate neighbourhood, celebrating the immense amount of wonder that you can experience without ever buying a plane ticket – provided that you engage with the natural world surrounding you wherever you are: she lovingly describes the changes in the seasons, and the richness and complexity of the flora and fauna in the fields, woods and streams of a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. ‘The lover can see, and the knowledgeable,’ Dillard says. When you love a person, you notice the unique way one corner of her lips goes down just before going up in a smile. When you know a person, you notice how she passes a hand through her hair, on the right side. This noticing reinforces your love and your knowledge, and the pleasure of it never palls.