Exuberance: The Passion for Life (4 page)

The abundance of nature is most obviously seen in the diversity of species, those “
endless forms most beautiful” before which Darwin stood in awe. There are
a million and a half species of fungi, eight million of insects (including 350,000 varieties of beetles alone), and
more than a million species of bacteria. Nowhere is the exuberance of nature more apparent than in the tropical rain forest. Tens of thousands of species of animals and plants live on or under the forest floor, twine around the trees, or perch in the branches. Vines and orchids and fruits and flowers proliferate wildly under the canopy of the high trees. The rain forest is, as E. O. Wilson puts it, a “
green cathedral,” a teeming marker to nature’s fullness and variation. But it is not the only luxuriant place. John Muir wrote of the layered richness of the Yosemite wilderness: “
How deeply with beauty is beauty overlaid! The ground covered with crystals, the crystals with mosses and lichens and low-spreading grasses and flowers, these with larger plants leaf over leaf with every changing colour and form, the broad palms of the firs outspread over these, the azure dome over all like a bell-flower, and star above star.” Each place he looked, everywhere in the mountains and valleys, Muir saw examples of nature’s exuberance.

Nature’s lavishness is not limited to the rain forests or to the Sierra Nevada, of course, although in those places it is spectacular. It is also evident in the dispersal of plants and animals across the earth and throughout the seas, in the snowflakes that fall by the skyful, distinct yet innumerable, and in
the thickness of the
starfields.
Astronomers live among numbers that are unimaginable, fabulous, and terrifying. The universe, they believe, contains
at least 10
²¹
stars—1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000—and is home to more than 125 billion galaxies.
The Milky Way alone, scientists reckon, contains
10
⁴¹
—100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000—grams of diamond dust; or, differently put, a million trillion trillion trillion carats. Nature is impossibly fertile.

“Exuberance,” derived from the Latin
exuberance—ex
, “out of,” +
uberare
, “to be fruitful, to be abundant”—is at its core a concept of fertility. Exuberance in nature is defined by lush, profuse, riotous growth; it is an overflowing, opulent, and copious abundance. Early uses of “exuberance” in English were mostly in the context of descriptions of nature, of profuse crops or of kinetic natural phenomena such as shooting stars, sulfur springs, and waterfalls. A fruitful outcome of an alchemy experiment, for instance, was characterized as “exuberated earth” in 1471, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, and in 1513 a particularly luxuriant plant was said to be “a pure perfyte plante … Marvelous by growynge … of grace exuberaunt.” Two hundred years later, in “Spring,” the Scottish poet James Thomson addressed not only “exuberant Nature,” but the exuberant emotions provoked by nature:

Over time, the definition of “exuberance” evolved; where it had focused on the fertility of nature, it began to center on the fertility
and force of human energy and mood. Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary published in 1755, gives an example of “exuberance” taken from the writings of Joseph Addison. Its meaning is modern not only in the mood it describes but in the infectiousness of that mood: “that
exuberant
devotion, with which the whole assembly raised and animated one another.” In our time, “exuberance” usually denotes a mood or temperament of joyfulness, ebullience, and high spirits, a state of overflowing energy and delight. It is more energetic than joy and enthusiasm but less intense, although of longer duration, than ecstasy. The origins of the concept of exuberance in the cyclic fertility of nature, now largely forgotten, remain critical to understanding it as a primitive life force vital to survival.

For all of nature’s exuberance, there are constraints upon it. Nature proliferates, but it also kills. Predators, disease, and drought impose limits on growth, as do fluctuations in light and temperature. Precarious balances are kept and broken, and exuberancies ebb and flow in response to the changes. Underlying everything is nature itself, and it is in response to nature that we have evolved the senses and temperaments by which we variously respond to the physical world. Nature is our literal world and the genesis of our imaginative one as well. It was, as Edward Hoagland has argued, the “
central theater of life for everybody’s ancestors.”

The experience of nature is an idiosyncratic thing. The eyes of the poet are not the same as those of the farmer: needs are different. A poet may look from a mountaintop, as Robert Crawford has, and see the beauty in the “
bens and glens of stars”; a farmer may see instead the grazing promise of the lands below. A passionate emotional response may be more natural to the former, pragmatic surveillance of more use to the latter. For most in a village, a mountain range may be the border they know to be inviolable, to be kept to, but for a few the mountains will be irresistible, an enticement to risk and rapture. Some see and feel nature’s presence acutely and are
driven by restlessness, curiosity, or the possibilities of pleasure to explore it further. Others stay in the lands they know; they react not so passionately, seek out not quite so much.

This makes sense. It is essential that some feel so strongly that they are compelled to explore and to work out the ways of nature—it is they who discern the patterns of changing light, measure variations in rainfall, plot the movement of the stars; who monitor the sprouting of seeds or the darkening of grass, track the migration of caribou or mammoth; and who take note of the dangers of belladonna or the benefits of willow bark—for man’s well-being depends upon observing the behavior of nature. To observe is to make preparation possible, to predict. “
Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades?” asks God of Job. “Can you loose the cords of Orion? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons? Do you know the laws of the heavens?” The complexities of nature are manifold, to comprehend the laws of nature infinitely seductive.

Exuberance is not necessary for keen observation, of course. Nor is it a requirement for ascertaining the underlying patterns of nature. But, as we shall see, those who are exuberant engage, observe, and respond to the world very differently than those who are not and, what is crucial, they have an intrinsic desire to continue engaging it. This engagement is generally not a muted one; rather, it is one filled with a sense of passion, if not actual urgency: “
Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds, or the written music of water written in river-lines?” asked John Muir, with the intensity that shot through his life and work. “Who reports the works and ways of the clouds … And what record is kept of Nature’s colors?” Muir’s temperament vibrated in response to all that moved around him. He
felt
nature’s sounds and colors, experienced them with joy; he was compelled to keep a record of those colors and to publish the music of the winds.

There is little more important to us than to have some portion of
our species respond acutely to transformations in the natural world. To hunt, plant, breed, harvest—all of these require an awareness of changes in the length of daylight and fluctuating fecundities in the physical world. Those most responsive to these changes surely had a survival advantage over those who were less alert. Many of our most intense emotional reactions tend to occur in response to precipitous changes in nature: our pulse quickens or slows; we stay in place, transfixed, or we bolt; we are filled with joy or terrified. These responses are deeply wired into our brains from our premammalian ancestors. Alertness is intrinsic to our survival. So, too, is joy. The pleasure and benefit we find in understanding a part of nature rewards our curiosity, our inquiry; expectation of pleasure makes it more probable that we will inquire yet again and act upon our curiosity in the future.

Much of our joy is in direct response to nature. “
In the presence of nature,” writes Emerson, “a wild delight runs through man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, —he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind.”

Our minds and our emotions mind nature. In her
landmark study of ecstasy, Marghanita Laski found that the most common “triggers,” or inducers of transcendent ecstasies, are from nature: water, for instance, and mountains, trees, and flowers; dusk and nighttime; sunrise, sunlight; dramatically bad weather; and, of course, spring. Laski alleges, and in this she concurs with the ethologist Niko Tinbergen, that these “triggers” release biologically desirable responses of attraction. They are, in essence, attracting, engaging, and bolstering forces. The joy brought about by an ecstatic reaction to spring, for instance, makes it more likely that an individual will watch for signs of its approaching, attend to subtle
changes in light and temperature, and actively participate in the season’s pleasures and demands once it has arrived.

We bring to spring the expectations planted by nature in the brains of our ancestors. They waited upon the sun’s return and, in the while, sent out their rainmakers and firemakers to coax the day into lengthening and to beguile the winter darkness into vanishing. They believed that to recapture long days of warmth and light they needed only to drape themselves in bark and leaves and flowers; that is, they needed only to look the part of spring. Magic could blandish nature into returning her plants and sunlight.

Later, when enough seasons had passed to brand their unvarying pattern upon those who kept watch on them, magical rituals turned increasingly to an invocation of the gods. The Greek, said Sir James Frazer, “
fashioned for himself a train of gods and goddesses … out of the shifting panorama of the seasons, and followed the annual fluctuations of their fortunes with alternate emotions of cheerfulness and dejection … [which] found their natural expression in alternate rites of rejoicing and lamentation.” Dionysian worship—distinguished by ecstatic dance and music as well as sacrificial blood feasts—was one of the most evident of these rites. Exuberant behavior was meant to yield an exuberant harvest. An exuberant harvest, in turn, incited exuberant celebration. Man’s primitive gods, as well as his moods and actions, took their cue from nature.

Our dispositions and our generativity swing with the turning of the seasons. We wait for joy to return. “
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring,” exclaimed Gerard Manley Hopkins. “What is all this juice and all this joy?” The contrast between the bleakness of winter and the “juice and joy” of spring; the sense of a greater distance from death; a hope for regeneration: all these go into our emotional responses to the change of seasons.
Our vitalities change in response to the quickening we observe in nature. Our energy is
fullest and our moods most expansive in the presence of long-lit days. They fall precipitously in the shorter, darker ones. We rejoice at the turning of winter into longer days. “
The brooks sing carols and glees,” Thoreau wrote of Walden Pond’s transition into spring: “The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds.… The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod.” Such is the contrast between winter and spring, said Thoreau. “
Walden was dead and is alive again.”

The festivals and celebrations to commemorate the return of light and renewed fertility are ancient, universal, and often spectacularly joyous. The Christian celebration of Easter, like pagan festivals before it, proclaims the great victory of light over the forces of darkness, of life over death. Easter, named for the Anglo-Saxon goddess whose festival was held at the spring equinox, is a movable feast: its celebration date—the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox—is embedded in the cycles of nature, in the eternal wanderings of earth, moon, and sun. Indeed, common belief once held that the sun dances on Easter Day, a marvelous image of joy captured by the poet John Heath-Stubbs:

The joy of the sun is ours.

Easter observations actually begin, however, in a deep darkness reminiscent of winter and death. On Good Friday, the day of
Christ’s crucifixion, all that is bright or decorative in a church is removed: the altar cross is draped in black cloth; there is no singing. The Gospel reading tells of the death of a god, of betrayal and suffering. Church bells toll at three p.m., the time Christ is said to have died; a time, according to St. Matthew, when
darkness covered the land. There is no remedy of light on Good Friday; only darkness obtains.

The oldest liturgy in the Christian church takes place the following night and it, too, begins in darkness. For two millennia, in open or furtive gatherings around the world, an Easter Vigil has been kept to mark the symbolic transition of darkness into light, the triumph of life over death, redemption over sin. Congregants wait for the first light from candle or fire and watch as the sun rises in the sky on Easter morning. For many, Easter Sunday is a deeply religious occasion, the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ. For others, it is different: an occasion of bright color and exuberant music, or a nod to the traditions of childhood. For most, whatever their beliefs, there is a remnant of the ancient desire to exult in the return of spring, to venerate the renewal of life.