A Sand County Almanac

[U.S.] Aldo Leopold: Sand County Almanac — Leopold’s Meditations on Nature, translated by Wu Meizhen, revised by Wang Ruixiang, China Social Sciences Publishing House, March 2004

This is the Taiwanese edition of Sand County Almanac (Leopold); it seems to include the most complete set of essays, and should be the best version.

From whatever angle you look at it, this book is essential reading. It is praised, together with Walden, as a model of nature-and-humanity writing; it was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the ten must-read books in the humanities in its “Books of the Century” list; it has been called the Bible of ecologism; and Leopold has been hailed as the father of modern environmental protection, the prophet and sower of ecological ethics… There is no need to list the book’s praises any further.

When I was writing a paper on ecological philosophy last year, I had already leafed through Sand County Almanac, but I only very opportunistically read the last philosophical essay on “land ethics,” and did not read the earlier diary entries and essays. Later, I once wanted to read this book, or Walden, straight through, but after a few pages I stopped, because the effect was poor.

A book like this cannot be read the way one reads academic books—especially obscure philosophical books—by holding one’s breath and “biting into” it. When I first tried to read it, I happened to be in the midst of that fierce mood of “biting through one book a day,” and I brought too much force to bear on these books; naturally the result was not ideal. One cannot read this kind of book with a utilitarian mindset, nor expect to glean from it, as one might from a philosophy book one has finally chewed through, lots of passages for notes and readerly reflections. If one insists on “reading something out of it,” one will end up getting nothing at all.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part, “A Sand County Almanac,” gathers his life and observations in the shack in Sand County, arranged in order from January to December; the second part, “The Land Ethic,” intersperses accounts of his experiences in several places, and the famous “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which was selected for middle-school Chinese textbooks, comes from the chapter “Arizona and New Mexico”; the third part, “The Taste of the Countryside,” collects some essays of a more philosophical cast; and the fourth part, “The Disappearing Wild,” contains the three most important philosophical essays: “The Land Ethic,” “Wilderness and Civilization,” and “Conservation Aesthetic.” This ordering is precisely meant to remind readers like me, who are so utilitarian—“land ethics” does not come from arguments on the page, but from living experience and felt experience.

Reading this kind of book differs in some respects both from reading philosophy and from reading fiction. One difference is that I can hardly even “prove” that I really read the whole thing through—I can, by sorting out its positions, viewpoints, and argumentative flow, or by recounting its plot and its twists and turns, “prove” that I really read a certain philosophy book or a certain novel through well; with books of knowledge, it is even easier. But with a book like this, it is not easy to “retell” anything at all. It was precisely because, after reading a few pages, I felt that it was “as if I had not read it at all” that I stopped my previous attempt. I understood that the problem lay in my own reading state. Now, after having read several literary works in succession, it is exactly the right time to reread this book. Once again, just as before: after finishing it, I felt “as if I had not read it at all,” and yet I gained certain inexpressible “feelings.” No shock at all—though the book does contain profound thought—no excitement or exhilaration; “light and plain” —and that is precisely the feeling this book ought to produce, and also the feeling that is “natural.” Nature can often bring people excitement, exhilaration, novelty, and awe, but the more important and fundamental feeling is precisely “tranquility.” I gaze at and admire nature as though I were not gazing at anything at all—this is exactly the feeling of being “in nature.” A patch of wild grass, a dead tree, a barren plain can all provoke a long stare; and yet once I try to ask why I am staring, or what I hope to find through my staring, I discover that I will find nothing, and can “get” nothing. But once I forget the utilitarian notion that “I must gain something,” I will gain peace of mind.

2006年8月23日

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.