Florida.
There is a stream of thinking among American writers that remembers what Florida was: the American Jungle.
It wasn’t a state until 1845.
It’s own congressional delegate admitted in 1824 that Florida was not much more than a “tangled mass of vines and a labyrinth of undergrowth.”
Another observer said, “No man would immigrate into Florida–not even from hell itself.”
When Ralph Waldo Emerson was young, he made a trip to St. Augustine in Florida, the oldest continuous European settlement in North America.
The Spanish has been the only ones there for about two and a half centuries, finally ceding it to the United States in 1819.
St. Augustine was in North America, but was positively not North American. Surrounded by jungle, in the city there was an old Spanish castle, ancient city gates, walled gardens, a Catholic church, and the whole town was surrounded by a double row of yucca.
It was nothing like Emerson’s Boston and it made a deep impression on him.
As his ship approached St. Augustine, Emerson said, “We heard the roaring of the beach long before we saw land, and the sea itself was full of green leaves, twigs, and feathers.”
This sense of appreciation for wildness was bequeathed from Emerson to Thoreau. After he wrote “Walden,” he wrote an equally good essay called, “Walking.” It is a celebration of wildness. The first sentence: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.” He goes on, “I don’t think Adam himself in paradise was better situated that a backwoodsman in this country . . . in Wildness is the preservation of the World . . . If it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.”
This was picked up again by the poet Wallace Stevens.
He keeps coming back to things wild and green . . . and to Florida.
In one poem, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock,” civilized people, getting ready for bed in their pajamas, are like ghosts. They’ve lost the wild and their imaginations. The closest thing to a true human is a drunken sailor, who still dreams of risky adventures.
“An old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.”
What is all this getting at?
We are constantly trying to civilize our lives.
Keep them calm and in order.
These writers are saying, “Be careful. The most ordered and calm thing in the world is the grave. In wildness, there is life.”
All these writers were homebodies. They traveled, but not much.
The point isn’t to hop on a pirate ship and “Live!”
That’s not the point.
The point is, don’t always think too poorly of the disorder in your life. It gives life. Without the mess and pain of childbirth, there is no life. That, in a sense, ought never to change throughout all of life.
But more importantly, these writers are concerned about the Florida of your mind. Lose some of the wildness in your imagination and you lose your inner life.
Remember Florida.
Tom+