In the most
recent reading from Paul Schnider’s The
Adirondacks: A History of America’s First, I was particularly fascinated with the Romantic conception that God is
omnipresent in nature. As an individual who is not religious, I found this reading especially thought-provoking. First, Schnider writes,
“…the terror wilderness evoked in the hearts and minds of mortals was due not
to the presence of the devil, as had earlier been believed, but to awe in the
face of God’s creative power” (160). To early Romantics, the Adirondacks at
first seemed intimidating because they were unexplored and uninhabited.
However, people were now frightened by how strong God’s powers are to have
created the Adirondacks in the first place.
As Phillip
Terrie in Forever Wild points out, there
was a romantic belief that God was omnipresent in nature, and this omnipresence
gave the Adirondacks a sacred connotation. For example, people believed that
guides lived closer to God since they lived in the Adirondacks all year round. Moreover,
the pastor of the influential Park Street Church in Boston suggested that every
congregation should send their minister to the Adirondacks for a month each
year. In doing this, the minister would be purified and would therefore become closer
to God.
Additionally,
Schnider also writes, “What endangered the soul was not the presence of
wilderness at all, it turned out, but ‘the din and struggle’ of Broadway and Wall
Street” (165). Again, the previous conception was that wilderness was impure
because it was largely unknown to what exactly inhabited the forests. As mentioned in the quote above, it was widely accepted that a devil resided in the Adirondacks. However, Romantics
emphasized that urban areas made an individual’s soul impure, and that a trip
to the wilderness would help purify it. God created nature and resided in
nature, and therefore a trip to the Adirondacks would strengthen and individual’s
relationship with God. The fact that people saw God in nature made the Adirondacks more approachable and a more desirable destination. One could argue that we can thank religion for creating a bridge between humanity and nature that augmented the notion of tourism.
No comments:
Post a Comment