So, reading Jack London this week has been awesome. What I find to be the most "awesome" about it, is it's real. Fantasy stories like Harry Potter are entertaining, but it's absolutely not real. Even London's fiction is real in a way, believable, and similar stories I'm sure have happened. London's writing could very easily be mistaken for non fiction. His first version of "To Build a Fire" could have easily been read as an article.
Naturalism is obviously very heavy on nature, which is one of my favorite things to read about. Nature is much more real than most anything else written about, and in that way, much more appealing to read. I know some people love reading because it takes them to different places, a fantasy world. Naturalism also takes me places, just those places happen to be real. Fantasy provides entertainment, but when it comes to literature, naturalism provides the mind to wonder and imagine foreign places, but also learn about life, death, and a lot between.
I agree that the stories London writes could certainly be based on real events. Even the stories that we don't have experience with like "Mauki" and "Law of the Land" are believable in the way he describes the characters and their memories. You mention that you like reading about nature, are their any nature stories you really enjoy?
ReplyDeleteMelissa Juhnke
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ReplyDeleteOh my favorite right now would have to be Henry David Thoreau and such publications as "The Maine Woods" and "Walden".
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite passages from Thoreau's "Ktaadn"
"Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature,or whatever else men call it, while coming down this part of the mountain.We were passing over"Burnt Lands," burnt by lightning, perchance, though they showed no recent marks of fire, hardly so much as a charred stump, but looked rather like a natural pasture for the moose and deer, exceedingly wild and desolate, with occasional strips of timber crossing them, and low poplars springing up, and patches of blueberries here and there. I found myself traversing them familiarly, like some pasture run to waste, or partially reclaimed by man; but when I reflected what man, what brother or sister or kinsman of our race made it and claimed it, I expected the proprietor to rise up and dispute my passage. It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,--to be the dwelling of man, we say,--so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,--not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,--no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,--the home, this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, --to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we. We walked over it with a certain awe, stopping, from time to time, to pick the blueberries which grew there, and had a smart and spicy taste. Perchance where our wild pines stand, and leaves lie on their forest floor, in Concord, there were once reapers, and husbandmen planted grain; but here not even the surface had been scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world. What is it to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star's surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,--that my body might,--but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,--daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,--rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? "