Cooper created Natty Bumppo, a native protagonist who found purity in the wild, deceit in the City. With this likable, admirable character, Cooper, according to Nash, "discovered the literary possibilities of the wilderness. Wild forests and plains, as Cooper both knew and imagined them, dominate the action and determine the plots of these novels..."
No major writer had ever done this, made wild nature itself a character with depth and tone.
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John Muir And The Ice That Started The Fire
Kim Heacox
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When I first started re-reading The Deerslayer, I was immediately taken with the description of Glimmer Glass and the Forest, as I was when I was a kid! And thinking on this, I wondered if Muir read the Deerslayer as a kid. He was born fifteen years after its publication. So I did search: John Muir John Fenimore Cooper, and among the first finds, was the quote above. Searches sometimes do that, pull out a quote from deep in a book. Very useful when they do!
I liked the quote, and bought the book, and looked up Nash too, and I haven't gotten around to reading the book (gave up on Nash's work, out of print), until this afternoon, after giving up on going out--just too hot!
Here's another quote:
Alaska would be to John Muir what the Mississippi River was to Mark Twain, or the mountains of Assisi, in central Italy, had been to Saint Frances.
xiv
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On reading that today, I scratched my head, 'isn't that what I just said/posted!?'...hmmph...
Else ware, the author goes on to note that landscape in literature was unused by authors much as it was unrepresented in painting.
I know myself, in painting, landscape became popular with the topographers, and the Hudson River Valley painters, who were contemporaries of Cooper, and likely influenced him.
One of my thoughthobbies is to note just when landscape became important in art, writing, accounts, anything...like when I was reading George Washington's diaries written during the French Indian War, the time of The Deerslayer, I took note of just how little landscape is mentioned. It's a wonder if early western culture ever really dwelled on nature say the way early Japanese did. One wonders what would have happened to Muir if he had gone to Japan!
Much art and literature has been lost, all the Greek encaustic painting gone, so it's an assumption to say landscape was unseen, or un-sensed. Cleary in the romantic medieval tales of Knights and their achievements, works like the Mabinogion, tales Cooper borrowed from, and Twain, and London, and likely read by Muir, landscape, Nature, is portrayed, and has a role. So, I don't know.
The question I'm looking at is why some people are sensate to Nature, and others have no regard for Nature at all. And if one can follow a growth of sensate to Nature down through history. Don't know if the ancient Egyptians were being silly, stupid, nuts, with their animal headed gods, or wise in some way we nowadays can't fathom!
Anyway, Muir took upon himself to go on Knight's errands, the first that 1000 mile walk (which Colin Fletcher echoes in his 1000 mile walk!). Muir wanted to do something 'epic', and would be in sync with bloggers nowadays wanting to make 'epic blogs by doing epic things'
In the book, there's a photo of Muir on the steamer to Ft. Wrangle, and the caption reads:
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John Muir on the steamer Cassiar shorty before his first epic canoe journey in the Fall of 1879.
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Well, epic is a literary term for works like the Iliad and Odyssey...brb..." extending beyond the usual or ordinary especially in size or scope"....
An observation to make here is that Muir would regard a Glacier as 'epic', and know full well that it was made from very ordinary rain drops. And clearly he wanted to be 'glacial', and don't know but the author of the book is reaching for that too...'fire and ice' indeed!
But what I'm reaching for here is Muir's questing. The old romantic Knights' tales have a name for it...which I haven't searched up yet, it's a French term...but found this, which is evidence for the 'forest' in early literature!
quote:
This story cycle recounts multiple quests, in multiple variants, telling stories both of the heroes who succeed, like Percival (in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival) or Sir Galahad (in the Queste del Saint Graal), and also the heroes who fail, like Sir Lancelot. This often sent them into a bewildering forest. Despite many references to its pathlessness, the forest repeatedly confronts knights with forks and crossroads, of a labyrinthine complexity.[8] The significiance of their encounters is often explained to the knights—particularly those searching for the Holy Grail -- by hermits acting as wise old men -- or women.[9] Still, despite their perils and chances of error, such forests, being the location where the knight can obtain the end of his quest, are places where the knights may become worthy; one romance has a maiden urging Sir Lancelot on his quest for the Holy Grail, "which quickens with life and greenness like the forest."[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest#Literary_analysis
now, lemesse if I can find that French term, which I want for the post's title...and I'll have it!..brb...oh...found a Japanese version "Musha shugyō"....brb...found it:
chanson de geste
went through a lot of Knights, but Song of Roland, being a French tale, had it!
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The chanson de geste, Old French for "song of heroic deeds" (from gesta: Latin: "deeds, actions accomplished"[1]), is a medieval narrative, a type of epic poem that appears at the dawn of French literature.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chanson_de_geste
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:)
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
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