A Sense Of The Morning: Nature Through New Eyes

David Brendan Hopes, a literary scholar and painter based in North Carolina, does not value the natural world for its beauty, beautiful though it surely is. He prizes it instead, he writes in this engaging book of essays, "because it bears witness," because understanding its operating principles affords us humans something approaching wisdom. Hopes writes of having learned a few hard lessons on his travels into the wild. One alternately humorous and sobering essay, for instance, describes his encounter on a mountain trail with a grumpy mother bear, who left him with an eight-inch-long laceration as a souvenir. ("She had meant nothing by it," Hopes writes, forgivingly. "She used my leg to steady herself as she would have the limb of a tree, and with the same consequence.") He also ponders the play of improbability and self-discovery that nature seems to delight in, writing of an encounter along the Gulf of Mexico with the exceedingly rare, possibly extinct Eskimo curlew, a bird that wasn't supposed to be there at that time of year. His sighting may have been mistaken, Hopes suggests. But, he writes, he may also have seen a ghost, a creature that had "pulled a vanishing act so complete and so subtle we cannot yet process the reality of it." Quiet and humane, Hopes's essays speak to the pleasures and occasional pains of a life spent in nature, bearing witness along with the world. --Gregory McNamee