Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver

particular. Several summers ago on the cabin porch, surrounded by summertime yard sales and tobacco auctions, I wrote about Africa, for heaven’s sake. I wrote long and hard and well until I ended each day panting and exhilarated, like a marathon runner. I wrote about a faraway place that I once knew well, long ago, and I have visited more recently on research trips, and whose history and particulars I read about in books until I dreamed in the language of elephants. I didn’t need to be in Africa as I wrote that book; I needed only to be someplace where I could think straight, remember, and properly invent. I needed the blessed emptiness of mind that comes from birdsong and dripping trees. I needed to sleep at night in a square box made of chestnut trees who died of natural causes.
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    It is widely rumored, and also true, that I wrote my first novel in a closet. Before I get all rapturous and carried away here, I had better admit to that. The house was tiny, I was up late at night typingwhile another person slept, and there just wasn’t any other place for me to go but that closet. The circumstances were extreme. And if I have to—if the Furies should take my freedom or my sight—I’ll go back to writing in the dark. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper. Probably I’ve already tempted fate by announcing that I need to look upon wilderness in order to write. (I can hear those Furies sharpening their knives now, clucking, Which shall it be, dearie? Penury or cataracts? ) Let me back up and say that I am breathless with gratitude for the collisions of choice and luck that have resulted in my being able to work under the full-on gaze of mountains and animate beauty. It’s a privilege to live any part of one’s life in proximity to nature. It is a privilege, apparently, even to know that nature is out there at all. In the summer of 1996 human habitation on earth made a subtle, uncelebrated passage from being mostly rural to being mostly urban. More than half of all humans now live in cities. The natural habitat of our species, then, officially, is steel, pavement, streetlights, architecture, and enterprise—the hominid agenda.
    With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in. I think of the astonished neighbor children who huddled around my husband in his tiny backyard garden, in the city where he lived years ago, clapping their hands to their mouths in pure dismay at seeing him pull carrots from the ground . (Ever the thoughtful teacher, he explained about fruits and roots and asked, “What other foods do you think might grow in the ground?” They knit their brows, conferred, and offered brightly, “Spaghetti?”) I wonder what itwill mean for people to forget that food, like rain, is not a product but a process. I wonder how they will imagine the infinite when they have never seen how the stars fill a dark night sky. I wonder how I can explain why a wood-thrush song makes my chest hurt to a populace for whom wood is a construction material and thrush is a tongue disease.
    What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. We seem to succumb so easily to the prevailing human tendency to pave such places over, build subdivisions upon them, and name them The Willows, or Peregrine’s Roost, or Elk Meadows, after whatever it was that got killed there. Apparently it’s hard for us humans to doubt, even for a