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A review by karabc19
Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World by Kathleen Jamie
5.0
Kathleen Jamie’s collection of fourteen essays is subtitled “A Conversation with the Natural World,” but “conversation” seems too loose a word for the tightly conceived, brilliantly developed meditations that offer the reader dense, gorgeous descriptions of one very particular part of the natural world and deep, philosophical insights into humans’ relationship with it. However, it does suggest the way she approached the natural world, which is not as a conquerer, thrill-seeker, or looking to test her mettle, but as a compassionate friend and attentive listener. Sightlines is Walden set in the cold, isolated North Atlantic. Like Thoreau, Jamie details an immersive experience of the natural world in sensual terms, often setting it up with a pull toward the freedom of escape and isolation, juxtaposing modernity with nature (instead of a train, there is a helicopter), and guiding us toward metaphors to deepen our reading of nature. In many ways Sightlines surpasses Walden in its intent, tone, and beauty. Where Thoreau will occasionally lapse into didacticism, Jamie is suggestive and respectful. Each time the reader opens the book to a new essay, she is setting off to sea.
Her first essay “Aurora” about a cruise that she takes through Greenland’s fjords gives us the grand imagery of icebergs. Giant masses of floating ice with a deadly history to humankind would be a perfect opportunity to set a romantic tone for the book: encountering the sublime in the incomprehensible ginormity of the iceberg, simultaneously feeling one’s smallness and connection to a larger whole in this confrontation, and the resulting contemplation of one’s mortality. Jamie beautifully resists this romanticism and sets an entirely different tone for her book: “Someone calls, ‘They’re so . . . organic!’ But organic is just what they’re not. Their shapes and forms are without purpose, adapted to no end. They are huge and utterly meaningless.” The “greater existence” of the iceberg is hidden underwater, but Jamie does not tug this tempting thread. It’s not because Jamie is not contemplative. Far from it. But she does not bog herself or the book down in idealism, in trying to master the huge questions of the world and life. She writes about huge objects—icebergs, whales, and a vast, cold ocean—but she views them as an anthropologist and journalist: she studies smaller fragments of them, she connects the objects to human history and interaction, and the reader enjoys being witness to where her curiosity leads her. Through her thorough descriptions, Jamie lets the reader decide what to make of the natural world, what purpose and meaning its wonders might reveal, and what our own relationship to it might be. In “On Rona,” she finds a saint’s cell: “I crept in just to wonder what he did in there, Ronan; to imagine him right there, in front of the altar, wrapped in darkness, rapt in prayer, closed off from the sensory world, the better to connect with . . . what?” On the one hand, Jamie is questioning how one can possibly connect with anything more meaningful by closing off sensory experience. And on the other hand, it is the question: What are we hoping to connect with when we go off into the remote wilderness?
The brilliance of Jamie’s book is that she resists coming to conclusions about the meaning and purpose of nature, because that would be an aggressive and unfair thing to do to nature. Like Thoreau, she wants to offer a record of the natural world, perhaps before it disappears by our hand. Unlike the Thoreauvian impulse to sound its depths for answers, be spiritually renewed by it, or prove oneself by it, Jamie quietly observes, listens, delights in, and appreciates the natural world without expectation or judgment. Instead of Emerson’s reaching for what was beyond the physical world, trying to extend his vision beyond the horizon, Jamie’s sightlines stay firmly in the visible world, to what is in front of her. And it is thus in Jamie’s imagining of the natural world—a world far more physically remote than Walden—that we feel the most connected to it rather than apart from or above it.
Her first essay “Aurora” about a cruise that she takes through Greenland’s fjords gives us the grand imagery of icebergs. Giant masses of floating ice with a deadly history to humankind would be a perfect opportunity to set a romantic tone for the book: encountering the sublime in the incomprehensible ginormity of the iceberg, simultaneously feeling one’s smallness and connection to a larger whole in this confrontation, and the resulting contemplation of one’s mortality. Jamie beautifully resists this romanticism and sets an entirely different tone for her book: “Someone calls, ‘They’re so . . . organic!’ But organic is just what they’re not. Their shapes and forms are without purpose, adapted to no end. They are huge and utterly meaningless.” The “greater existence” of the iceberg is hidden underwater, but Jamie does not tug this tempting thread. It’s not because Jamie is not contemplative. Far from it. But she does not bog herself or the book down in idealism, in trying to master the huge questions of the world and life. She writes about huge objects—icebergs, whales, and a vast, cold ocean—but she views them as an anthropologist and journalist: she studies smaller fragments of them, she connects the objects to human history and interaction, and the reader enjoys being witness to where her curiosity leads her. Through her thorough descriptions, Jamie lets the reader decide what to make of the natural world, what purpose and meaning its wonders might reveal, and what our own relationship to it might be. In “On Rona,” she finds a saint’s cell: “I crept in just to wonder what he did in there, Ronan; to imagine him right there, in front of the altar, wrapped in darkness, rapt in prayer, closed off from the sensory world, the better to connect with . . . what?” On the one hand, Jamie is questioning how one can possibly connect with anything more meaningful by closing off sensory experience. And on the other hand, it is the question: What are we hoping to connect with when we go off into the remote wilderness?
The brilliance of Jamie’s book is that she resists coming to conclusions about the meaning and purpose of nature, because that would be an aggressive and unfair thing to do to nature. Like Thoreau, she wants to offer a record of the natural world, perhaps before it disappears by our hand. Unlike the Thoreauvian impulse to sound its depths for answers, be spiritually renewed by it, or prove oneself by it, Jamie quietly observes, listens, delights in, and appreciates the natural world without expectation or judgment. Instead of Emerson’s reaching for what was beyond the physical world, trying to extend his vision beyond the horizon, Jamie’s sightlines stay firmly in the visible world, to what is in front of her. And it is thus in Jamie’s imagining of the natural world—a world far more physically remote than Walden—that we feel the most connected to it rather than apart from or above it.