Knowing nature, Lorimer would often say, means learning how to be. The carpenter who can only devise tabletops while walking through the forest, the poet who can only remember his own private sorrows while looking at the falling snow, the naturalist who can only attach a label to every leaf and a pin to every insect-all of them are debasing nature by turning it into a storehouse, a symbol, or a fact. Having understood and experienced this marvelous congruity, man can no longer examine his surroundings merely as a surface scattered with alien objects and creatures related to him only by their usefulness. And because that hare is everything, it is also us. The guts of the anatomized hare faithfully render the picture of the entire world. Looking at any particle with sufficient care, and following the chain that links all things together, we can arrive at the universe-the correspondences are there, if the eye is skillful enough to detect them. From one living thing, the properties of any other may be predicted. Some of the raindrops falling on the potato plants in your farm back in Sweden were once in a tiger’s bladder. Each minuscule being has spokes radiating out to all of creation. Our flesh is the debris of dead stars, and this is also true of the apple and its tree, of each hair on the spider’s legs, and of the rock rusting on planet Mars.

If anything, because we are all made of the same stuff. The hare, like a blade of grass or a piece of coal, is not simply a small fraction of the whole but contains the whole within itself. Examined with attention, the dissected hare illuminates the parts and properties of all other animals and, by extension, their environment.

The life the scalpel has ended ought to be honored by a caring, devoted appreciation for that creature’s unrepeatable individuality, and for the fact that, at the same time, strange as this may seem, this life stands for the entire natural kingdom. “A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love.

Trust by diaz