Richard Nelson, Reflections I

Nelson, Richard. The Island Within. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Nelson, Richard. Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Richard Nelson expresses in the form of a nature memoir the aesthetic sense of hunting. In the field of aesthetics, we call this “the sublime,” and it finds its classic definitions in Kant and Schopenhauer. Before the philosophers, though, let us allow this anthropologist-gone-native to speak.

In the first chapter of The Island Within, “The Face in a Raindrop,” Nelson has goes to the island to hunt, but he finds himself stranded by a storm. For three days, the merciless wind, the buckets of rain, the swelling sea, the enormous trees, the everyday exchange of life and death, and the intricate interconnections of all things on the island work on him. They dwarf him, they contain him, and they uphold him.

Here is the paragraph from which he draws the title of the chapter:

At this moment there must be more raindrops falling on the surface of the island that they are humans on earth, perhaps more than all the humans who ever lived. I’ve thought of raindrops as tiny and insignificant things, but against the scale of the earth itself, they’re scarcely smaller than I am. On what basis, then, can I consider myself more important? Koyukon elders say that each kind of weather, including rain, has its own spirit and consciousness. If this is true, there must be a spirit within every raindrop, as in all else that inhabits the earth. In this sense, we are two equal forms of being who stand in mutual regard. I bend down to look at a crystal droplet hanging from a hemlock needle and know my own image is trapped inside. It’s humbling to think of myself in this way. In the broader perspective of earth, I am nothing more than a face in a raindrop. p. 17