The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (21 page)

I was struck dumb in amazement.

Here was this God-given, blossoming snow-white tree, which was breathtaking in its beauty; and here was this God-given, breathtaking sound coming out of it. This tree, this tree of trees, was not just an astonishing apotheosis of floral beauty. It now appeared to be singing.

The rational part of me couldn’t cope. It was all too much, and it fell to bits. I had gone way past simple admiration into some unknown part of the spectrum of the senses, and there was only one possible response: I burst out laughing. And there, in the exquisite fullness of the springtime, was the joy of it.

6
Joy in the Beauty of the Earth

If we start with the calendar, and the markers of the world’s reawakening, we can go deeper into joy with the beauty our world possesses. I will single out two examples which have brought joy to my own life, one of colour and one of form.

I have never seen it actually remarked upon, but it is clear that the earth did not have to be beautiful for humans to evolve; we could have had a planet which perfectly well sustained us with air and water and food and shelter, without offering us aspects of itself which also lift the spirits and catch at the heart. For example, for a substantial part of the time that life has existed, the land surfaces of the earth were very likely to have been just one colour, the colour of the plants which from about 450 million years ago began to cover the ground, gradually becoming taller and forming forests. They were green, and so the earth, almost certainly, was green too. Many shades of green, perhaps. But green. For maybe 300 million years, give or take the odd epoch. Yet then the time came when some plants began to use insects instead of the wind to move their pollen around, and evolved reproductive organs with brightly coloured petals to advertise their presence and catch the insects’ eyes, just as
the magnolia did – and in a great outburst of beauty, flowers were born, and exploded in size and shape and colour and number. While the ancient seed plants without flowers, like the conifers and the cycads, now total only about a thousand species across the world, there are more than three hundred and fifty thousand plants whose reproductive systems are floral.

The emergence of flowering plants was one of the great revolutions of life on earth, but it didn’t have to happen, and certainly, nothing said it had to happen before we came along: we might well be living happily – in so far as we can live happily at all – in an all-green world still, and perhaps we would not miss what we had never had. As it is, most of us take the existence of flowers wholly for granted, save for the occasional perceptive soul such as the novelist Iris Murdoch, who had one of her characters say (in
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
, in 1970): ‘People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.’

They very well might. It is a peculiar property of the earth that it offers us beauty as well as the means to survive, but it is also a wondrous property, and it greatly moves us – as behaviourally modern humans, anyway. Hence over about forty thousand years we have steadily formalised our appreciation and our celebration of it, in what we have come to call art, from Lascaux to Leonardo. Until, that is, the last century. In the last hundred years or so, with the advent of modernism, a new artistic philosophy for an industrial age (and also for a world whose optimism had been irreparably fractured by the First World War), many of our society’s high cultural elites have consciously rejected the primacy of beauty, seeing its veneration as outmoded and complacent, and holding that the true purpose of art should be to challenge preconceptions; and they have largely forgotten all about, or simply ignored, where beauty comes from in the first place, which is the natural world.

In more recent decades the process has gone even further,
and beauty has become
suspect
. I spent the middle years of my life watching a novel notion take shape in my culture, and gather force: the undermining of the idea of excellence. My early years were lived in a world where the worth of excellence seemed to be taken for granted by everybody across the political spectrum: it was a cornerstone of the post-war meritocracy, as indeed it had been a cornerstone of European civilisation since classical Greece. But things have changed. In the last quarter of a century two opposing political visions have prevailed in two different sectors of our society. In economics, the vision of the free market, the vision of the Right, has carried all before it; while in social policy, the key idea of the Left, that of egalitarianism, has won no less signal a victory. Yet this is not egalitarianism as in equality of opportunity, a political concept at least as old as the American Declaration of Independence in 1776; this is a new egalitarianism, as in equality of outcome. The key idea is that there should be no more losers – not hard to sympathise with that – but therefore the corollary is that there should be no more winners, either. In anything. No more excellence. No more elites. So a concept, say, which has been central to European poetry since the troubadours of Provence began it all in the eleventh century, the praise of feminine beauty, more or less ceases to be valid, because it is seen as offensive to women who may not be thought beautiful, or it is seen as patronising to women who may have many gifts other than accidental beauty. If not invalid, at the very least such praise becomes questionable. Quite suddenly. Just like that. Petrarch should try singing the praises of his Laura today, and her beautiful eyes, and see if he gets published.

I am not making a stand against this development. I am not even suggesting it is wrong, or bad. I am merely saying that it has undeniably happened, and it is noteworthy. Beauty has in some quarters become bound up in ideology, it has become associated with privilege, it is seen as the plaything of those
who have greater advantages, and I have found myself wondering (only in idle moments, of course) if the day might not come when to express open and unqualified admiration for an orchid, say – I mean for its beauty, its elegance and its glamour, all qualities many orchids undeniably possess – might be thought inappropriate . . .

Probably not. But there is no denying that the veneration of the beauty of nature, which Wordsworth made the fount of his philosophy, has largely ceased to figure in high culture since modernism contemptuously swept it aside; and modernism’s triumph was of course comprehensive, in painting and sculpture, in music and in poetry. In the early part of the twentieth century, for example, there was a substantial group of English poets collectively known as the Georgians who wrote extensively about nature and were read by large audiences; some were quite good, some were not, but all except one were consigned to lasting oblivion by T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
in 1922 and the modernist revolution which followed (the exception, of course, being the wonderful Edward Thomas, who was anyway very much more than a ‘Georgian nature poet’). We retain the legacy of those attitudes. So beauty in general and the natural beauty of the earth in particular have gone largely unsanctioned as objects of relevance by the cultural elites of the twentieth and now of the twenty-first century, and we hear little of them from those quarters; and yet, of course, many ordinary people who do not feel they must be aligned with prevailing cultural modes of thought have been drawn to the beauty of nature as much as people ever were, and I am one of them. Let me tell you about a wood. Five times in the one week, I went to this wood. Five separate trips, on five successive days. And each time, after the first time, I stopped at the gate, I paused before entering. I savoured the moment. It felt like the minute before sex, with a new lover who is making ready – the elevated heartbeat, the skin-prickle, the certainty of impending pleasure – but it was
even more than that, it was the anticipation of a sort of ecstasy, at beholding what the wood contained, hidden in its depths, which was something truly exceptional, as exceptional as a crashed flying saucer, I found myself thinking . . . Each time I stopped at the gate I said to myself,
I know what is in there
. . .

It was a blue.

It was a blue that shocked you.

It was a blue that made you giddy.

It was a blue that flowed like smoke over the woodland floor, so that the trees appeared to be rising out of it, a blue which was not solid like a blue door might be solid but constantly morphing in tone with the light and the shade, now lilac, now cobalt, a blue which was gentle but formidably strong, so intense as to be mesmerising: at some moments it was hard to believe it was composed of flowers. But that was the beauty and the joy of the bluebells, their floral richness and their profusion, a dozen blue bell-heads nodding on every stem, a hundred thousand stems pressing together in every glade until it ceased to be plants, it was just an overwhelming incredible blueness at the bottom of a wood.

They make a remarkable phenomenon, bluebell woods: you enter and are amazed. They are one of the specialities of the natural world in Britain – the home of the flower is the damp Atlantic fringe of Europe and we have more of them than anywhere else – but of course they are not just a speciality, they are a glory, one of the two supremely beautiful habitats of my native land. In a countryside razed by the farmers in the Great Thinning, denuded of its former wealth of living things, they offer a miraculous, and perhaps the most magnificent, survival of abundance; the very profusion of the flowers, packed tightly together over wide areas, and always in descriptions prompting words such as
sheets
,
carpets
,
swathes
, is a major part of the attraction. But for me, it is not the key part, for the same effect can sometimes be seen with sheets of snowdrops, or with carpets
of wood anemones, or with swathes of ramsons (wild garlic), all of which are stunning yet would not draw me back, I am sure, for five days in a row. The key attraction is something else. It is the blue.

When people interested in aesthetics discuss beauty nowadays, and try to get to the heart of it, it seems to me they seldom stress colour; they tend to put much more emphasis on harmony, as in harmony of proportion, certainly in areas such as architecture or the human form. I fully see the force of this and would in no way dissent from it; I would only say that for me personally, colour in nature has an allure which is compelling, and the more striking the hue, the more exceptional and wondrous a place the natural world seems to be. Sometimes this can be very simple, as with the large copper butterfly, which died out in Britain in the nineteenth century, was reintroduced to Woodwalton Fen in Cambridgeshire in the twentieth, and sadly, died out again; but you can see it (and I have) in continental Europe. The large copper male bears four wings of the most lustrous bright orange. Nothing intricate: simply that. The purest, most saturated orange you can possibly conceive of; indeed, it may be more than you can conceive of, which is perhaps the source of the delight when you eventually set eyes on it, as your sense of what the world can contain is suddenly enlarged. In fact, nature’s ability to generate colours and colour combinations you have never seen before is endless, and that is part of the thrill, part of the joy of the beauty of the earth. If, as seems likely, for 300 million years the land was just one tone, green, then look at what we have now: there are those 350,000 and more species of wild flowers, as well as 200,000 butterflies and moths with painted wings and above a million other insects, 10,000 birds, 10,000 reptiles and 7,000 amphibians, virtually all of them using colour to differentiate themselves, not to mention perhaps 8,000 species of brilliantly bright coral reef fish. Could we ever list all their colours?

We would start, of course, with the eleven basic colour terms in English (ordered hierarchically according to the Berlin-Kay hypothesis): the black and the white; the red, the yellow, the green and the blue; the brown, the purple, the pink, the orange, and the grey. But that doesn’t remotely get it. What about the scarlet, the russet, the violet and the olive? The crimson, the sulphur, the indigo, and the emerald? What about the magenta and the turquoise, the ivory and the aquamarine, the lavender and the maroon, the coral and the mauve? As the gradations become more refined, so they seem to stretch in a line into a misty distance of subtlety – terracotta, lime, amethyst, fawn, jasmine, tawny, amber, cerise, butterscotch, mahogany, teal, beige, oyster, cerulean, ox-blood, fulvous, vermillion, tourmaline, gamboge – not just glowing singly but in heart-stopping combinations, in their patterns bold and patterns delicate, in their stripes and their spots and their cross-hatching . . . All of them, and so many more which we do not even have names for, are there in the natural world. Colour is its ultimate abundance.

They are there, of course, for a reason: they are functional. They have evolved through Darwinian natural selection purely to enhance survivability in their host organisms in a whole series of ways, from making them conspicuous to making them blend into the background, from making them frightening to predators to making them desirable to potential mates, from making them appear fit and dominant to making them appear poisonous . . . Yet for us this, the instrumental side of it all, which is fascinating, had to be uncovered by science, by evolutionary biology. It is not what we humans, possessed of an aesthetic sense, instinctively take in when we look at a creature like the Jersey tiger moth; we do not see that its black and cream striped forewings are camouflage to break up its outline and its blue-spotted crimson underwings are there to be flashed in the startled face of a predator to give the moth an extra millisecond to get away: we just see that it is gorgeous. And so
with flowers, and butterflies, and birds, and other organisms without number: they have their colour functionality; we have our joy in them.

It is part of our great fortune in finding ourselves on a planet that did not have to be beautiful for us to evolve on it, but turned out to be beautiful beyond what, in a monochrome world, we might ever imagine. Let me take just one example of a group of organisms I do not think we could invent, in their sheer colour diversity: the wood-warblers of North America. Although unrelated to the warblers of the Old World, such as our chiffchaff and willow warbler, these have co-evolved to occupy a similar ecological niche, as small insect gleaners of the treetops; yet whereas our birds are by and large plain-looking, dun creatures, mainly brown and olive-green – they do their signalling by song rather than appearance – the fifty or so warbler species of America display a range of flamboyant colour and patterning which is quite unparalleled (at least, with the male birds in their springtime breeding plumage). It can often be seen as variations on a theme, such as a black throat with this or a striped back with that, and the colours of this and that are intense – rufous, gold, sky-blue, dove-grey, flaming orange, navy, chestnut – juxtaposed in plumage arrangements which are often startling and make an incredible feast for the eyes. After my first, astonished experience of them, a few years ago, I asked a leading American ornithologist, Greg Butcher, then director of conservation for the National Audubon Society, and a plumage expert, how even natural selection could have produced such scarcely conceivable variety. He said: ‘Well, first there was selection for colour; then there was selection for difference; and then the palette was allowed to wander’ – which I thought was a charming idea. And how that palette has wandered! To give a single detailed example, the magnolia warbler, the breeding springtime male, has a grey crown, a white eyebrow, black cheeks, and a yellow throat – that’s just his head – and then a black
back, white wing-patches and a yellow belly marked with thick black stripes. And he’s far from the most spectacular: witness the golden-winged warbler, or the prothonotary warbler, which is even more golden, or the black-throated blue warbler, or especially the blackburnian warbler, which below its wings of black and white has underparts of such powerful, passionate orange that American birders have nicknamed it the firethroat. They are fragments of a rainbow, these birds, pieces of a painting, they seem like elements of a great meta-species; their coming, when they migrate from their wintering grounds in Central and South America to breed in the boreal forests of the USA and Canada, represents what is most exceptional, of all that is exceptional, about America’s spring, and I have thrilled to see them, even in New York’s Central Park, where I once watched an American redstart, one of the most exquisite of them all, a giant black and orange butterfly of a bird, hovering round the trees a few yards from the tourist-thronged Strawberry Fields memorial to John Lennon, shot dead outside the Dakota Building across the road.