Rising Before Dawn: Wilderness as Vocation

Rising Before Dawn: Wilderness as Vocation

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in the Wildness is the preservation of the World. —H.D. Thoreau, “Walking”

I want the truth, marrow-bone truth, and I find the intimations of it whenever I am alive to things, even the most familiar and commonplace things, for the wilderness I take them to comprise. It seems to me that every time I am born, the wilderness is born anew; and every time I am born it seems to me that then, if ever, I could be content to die. —Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning, p. 127-128

Précis

The Inward Morning is replete with images of daybreak, dawning, awakening, the illumination of horizons, the renewed promise of a new day, a clean slate, a second chance unburdened by second thoughts. Recorded throughout these journal entries are insights, epiphanies, and elucidations aplenty, any of which may trigger similar awakenings in us. In general, we find that Bugbee tracks the light as faithfully as the trout follows the well-tied fly.

At the same time, however, the figure of the “inward morning” departs significantly from the natural, cyclical process on which Bugbee ostensibly models it. Lest we mistakenly associate him with the ongoing project of Enlightenment, and its relentless campaign to eradicate the lingering shadows of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition, Bugbee makes clear that the figure he wishes to pursue is meant to convey a daybreak characterized by uniformly penetrating clarity and perspicacity. Unlike the outward morning on which it is modeled, the inward morning is neither gradual nor partial nor oriental in its advent. Rather, it explodes upon the scene of awareness, in a moment of sudden and total illumination, as if a master switch had been thrown. What he calls the “light of eternity” is in fact the even, ambient radiance in which all things stand forth in the fullness of their presence.

At such a moment, reality is disclosed to us in the fluent plenum of its totality, stripped clean of heuristic fictions, oppositional distinctions, cartographic grids of explanation, and all other accretions of human science and habituation. In his most illuminating discussion of what he calls “immersion,” Bugbee explains that Metaphysical thinking must rise with the earliest dawn, the very dawn of things themselves. And this is the dawn in which basic action, too, comes into being. It is earlier than the day of morality and immorality (IM, p. 52). Philosophers, he thus suggests, have acquired the unseemly habit of sleeping late, of lazily accepting the precepts of conventional morality as reliable indices of authentic (=“basic”) action. They have done so, moreover, precisely insofar as they have abandoned the noble tradition of “metaphysical thinking,” wherein philosophers endeavor to behold reality prior to the concoction of even the most basic of scientific postulates and philosophical distinctions.

There is a second sense in which the figure of the “inward morning” deviates from the outward morning on which it is modeled. To witness a resplendent sunrise is truly wondrous, but it does not usually involve much preparatory effort on our part. Daybreak is not something that we typically earn, whether by virtue of exertion or creativity, but something granted to us on a regular, cyclical basis. By way of contrast, Bugbee presents the inward morning as what might be called an achievement, as an epiphany whose event is not merely adventitious. As characterized in his journal, the figural “inward morning” has not yet dawned, precisely because it has not yet been earned. And even if he has won this (or some other) epiphany in the past, he must begin each day, and each journal entry, anew.

This means that the book The Inward Morning is preparatory to the dawning of the “inward morning”—hence the searching, fumbling, halting successes documented in the journal form that Bugbee bravely elects for the record of his philosophical exploration. The book The Inward Morning thus belongs not to the refulgent inscape illuminated by the inward morning, but to the twilit, shadow-shrouded moments before dawn. Although Bugbee’s journal occasionally glows in the reflected light of past epiphanies, it more centrally chronicles the struggles of his passage to future breaks of day. It is for this reason that The Inward Morning has become the vade mecum of those who rise before dawn, whether they be anglers in pursuit of leaping trout, surfers and rowers in search of windless, glassy water, or nervous, imperfect parents hoping to tap unknown reserves of inspiration, energy, patience, and love.