When I was a boy, I read a lot of science fiction. It seemed to me the most exciting and imaginative literature of the day—and to a boy of twelve, it probably was. I have forgotten most of what I read, but there is one story, Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall,” that made a deep impression on me. Asimov imagines a human society living on a planet in a solar system that has—I think—six suns. As a result, night comes to this planet just once every thousand years. The story begins on the eve of one of these millennial nightfalls and is told from the viewpoint of an astronomer who, like everyone else, anticipates this miraculous event with great expectation. But he is also concerned, a little worried, because the history of this society goes back only a thousand years, to the time of the previous nightfall. Before that, there is no record of human memory, though obviously the society has existed for a much longer time. Eventually the long-awaited night arrives, the stars, never before seen by anyone alive, come out in all their inconceivable splendor, and everyone goes mad.

This story unnerved me for a long time, and other people I have met who also read the story when they were young had a similar experience. For a long time I didn’t know why I had been so affected by it, but now I think that reading the story provided my first inkling that our lives, our deepest selves, our collective psychological identity might be shaped and controlled by stars and other manifestations of the physical universe in ways we did not understand, or even suspect—and that this had nothing to do with astrology.

I have been a writer for most of my life, and like almost all writers, I use natural metaphors. Since in my writing my primary subject has been nature, I tend to use more than most, I suppose, but nature as metaphor is our stock-in-trade, not just as writers, but as human beings. We can’t help it—it seems hardwired into our DNA to compare aspects of human nature to their counterparts in external nature. We do it largely to explain ourselves to ourselves, to get a clearer or more vivid understanding of who we are as human beings. One of the oldest examples of this in our culture is Aesop’s Fables, a series of popular allegorical narratives, supposedly written by a slave in ancient Greece, in which animals speak and behave like human beings in order to convey moral lessons. One of the best known of these is the fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” which tells of a spendthrift grasshopper that fiddles away the summer, making fun of an industrious ant that works hard to hoard food for the coming winter. The grasshopper, of course, represents improvident, hedonistic behavior compared to the sober, diligent, gratification-delaying ant. It is a lesson deeply ingrained in the work ethic of capitalism.

Religious instruction, too, has always borrowed images or symbols from the natural world to illustrate points. Christ said, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. Yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” This verse from Matthew seems to suggest a lesson opposite to that of the Aesop fable; at least you’re not likely to see it posted on many corporate Web sites.

The trouble with learning something about natural history, which I’ve had to do in my writing, is that it tends to undermine the moral meaning of many of these natural metaphors. One comes to understand that, after all, both grasshoppers and ants are marvelously adapted to their different environments, social structures, and life cycles, and after all, both ants and grasshoppers do survive—they just have different strategies. Also, those wonderful lilies eventually shrivel up and die each fall. Moreover, we know that they do toil and spin. All summer they’re busy photosynthesizing their little hearts out, and strenuously osmosizing nutrients through their rootlets. They just don’t make a fuss about it.

That’s been a problem that moralists and religious authorities have historically had with natural science, and perhaps one reason that it has so often been regarded as the enemy of both. Western culture created a cosmology in which the earth stood at the center of the universe, the heavens revolving around us, God’s favored creation. Then Copernicus revealed to us that this was just an optical illusion and that the sun was the true and perfect center of the solar system. It was painful, but we managed to shift our perspective. But then Galileo came along with his pesky telescope and told us that even the sun wasn’t perfect, that it had spots on it. He got in trouble with the Catholic Church for that, but eventually we had to accept the evidence of our scientifically augmented eyes.

Still, we could rest in the fact that we, as human beings, were made in God’s image, the pinnacle of creation, “a little lower than the angels,” in the psalmist’s words, set above and apart from the rest of brute creation by our divine spark. Then Charles Darwin made that fateful voyage to the Galápagos Islands and some finches there told him a different story, one that created a controversy that still rages today because it forced us to radically reevaluate our place in creation, and the origins of human nature.

So we retrenched again, reluctantly giving ground to astronomy and evolution. Our post-Darwin redoubt was rooted in what might be called our core identity: as possessors of free will, as a species that makes its own moral choices, whatever cosmological system or biological form it finds itself in. “I am the captain of my fate / I am the master of my soul,” bragged the late nineteenth century, in tones that sound like the rattling of chains. Then a Jewish doctor in Vienna mounted the most recent assault against our belief in human autonomy and uniqueness. Whatever scientific credibility Freud’s theories of the unconscious may have lost in recent decades, psychoanalysis has forever rid us of the quaint notion that we know what we are doing.

Yet despite these adjustments in our perception of ourselves and our place in the universe, natural metaphor has been, and remains, a mainstay of what we regard as peculiarly human creations: philosophy, religion, ethics, and poetry. This is to be expected, since all of these endeavors are expressed primarily through the use of abstract and symbolic language, another ability we had thought, at least until quite recently, to be a uniquely human trait. Then some chimps . . . but that’s another story.

That we continue to use natural metaphor so much is not surprising. Language is deeply rooted in the natural world. Even most abstract words have some etymological basis either in nature itself or in physical action. (One of the most fundamental examples is the word spirit, which implies something apart from, or at least beyond, nature, but which in fact derives from the Latin word for breath.) Indeed, if we could not rely on natural image and metaphor, many, perhaps most, of our religious, philosophical, and poetic thoughts could not be expressed. Where, for instance, would love be—both divine and secular—without the image of the rose?

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

My Luve’s like a red, red rose.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

O Rose, thou art sick.

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!

All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

The image of the rose is so pervasive in our culture’s poetry that I’m tempted to paraphrase Voltaire and say that if the rose did not exist, it would have required inventing—except I doubt that we would have been able to.

We need nature to give full expression to our deepest thoughts, our deepest feelings, our deepest longings—in other words, to give full expression to ourselves and who we are. Few would deny or contest that point. But it may be that, in using nature this way, we have misunderstood and underestimated its role in shaping us. At some point, I began to speculate consciously on the possibility that what we call our spiritual, or inner, life is as much a product of outer nature—of evolution and physical interaction with the world—as our bodies are, and that our concept of who we are, as individuals and as a culture, is, in naturalist Chet Raymo’s words, the result of “the mind in tactile contact with the world.”

As an example, it has been observed for some time that animals appear in children’s dreams far more frequently than they do in adults’. Recent studies suggest that children use animal images in their dreams to embody human emotions that are still too new and complex for them to process verbally. A child’s ability to dream in animal images may therefore be essential to the formation of certain key emotional and imaginative concepts. Some researchers have suggested, by extension, that early exposure to real animals is essential for the development of a healthy dream life.

For some time I made only tentative and brief explorations of the connections between external nature and our inner lives, hesitant that I was getting into waters deeper than I could swim in. But over the past decade or so I have become aware of others, more qualified than I am, who have been investigating this subject much more rigorously. One of the main proponents of this line of thinking has been the brilliant Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, who invented the term sociobiology to describe his hypothesis that much of what we regard as human social behavior, including ethics, may be the product of evolution and natural selection. Needless to say, like Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Freud, he has gotten into a lot of trouble for this.

One of Wilson’s most controversial suggestions has been that “altruism,” or self-sacrifice for the good of others, regarded as one of the highest Christian virtues, may in reality be a strategy developed through natural selection to insure the survival of one’s genes to a succeeding generation. His most famous, or perhaps infamous, formulation of this hypothesis goes as follows: “I will lay down my life for one child, two siblings, or four first cousins.” Morality as genetic mathematics. It didn’t sit well, not so much because it didn’t explain human behavior (in truth, it explains an extraordinary amount of it in ways no one had ever done before), but because, like Darwin’s theories, it was regarded as an attack on morality itself. Altruism had been one of the few bastions of exceptional humanness we had managed to salvage out of the wreck of scientific progress, and sociobiology threatened to undermine, if not collapse, its moral basis.

Linguistics, too, has yielded some provocative insights about the origins of abstract concepts. In 1996, David Abram—a philosopher, linguist, and street magician—published a groundbreaking book entitled The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More Than Human World. Among the many fascinating and challenging hypotheses in this book is his supposition that many of our fundamental intellectual concepts about time and space may actually derive from our ancestral experiences with elemental natural phenomena. For instance, Abram suggests that our notions of “past” and “future”—about as abstract and fundamental as you can get—derive from our physical experience of burial and the horizon:

The beyond-the-horizon, by withholding its presence, holds open the perceived landscape, while the under-the-ground, by refusing its presence, supports the perceived landscape. The reciprocity and asymmetry between these two realms bear an uncanny resemblance to the reciprocity and contrast between the future (or “what is to come”) and the past (or “what has been”) . . . Dare we suspect that these two descriptions describe one and the same phenomenon? I believe that we can, for the isomorphism is complete.

This whole line of inquiry into the relationship between human thought and nature has been proliferating rapidly. A new discipline called bio-philosophy, based on research in cognitive studies coupled with the physiology of the human brain, seems to be emerging, and is accumulating hard experimental evidence which indicates that the way our species thinks about the world is largely determined by our physiological makeup and our physical experience in the natural world. No doubt its adherents will be figuratively burned at the stake as heretics as well.

All of these recent theories, based on research, have only strengthened my initial suspicion that to read nature solely as a storehouse of symbols or metaphors or signs of God’s will—which is how it has primarily been used for most of our culture’s history—is, as nature writer John Hay puts it, “making too little of too much.” I suggest, rather, that looking at natural metaphor this way gets it 180 degrees backward. Could it not be that the ideas, notions, concepts, and beliefs that we regard as purely spiritual, religious, philosophical, or poetic do not merely find expressions and symbols and external correlatives in the natural world, but are themselves creations of that world?

Suppose—just suppose—not only that human thoughts are expressed by means of natural metaphor and symbol, but also that the concepts of thought themselves grew out of our original contact and experience with nature. Suppose that just as the human species evolved out of the natural world, so too human language, human concepts, the very deepest of human, emotions themselves—in other words, those attributes of our species’ identity which we use to separate ourselves from the rest of nature—in fact have their origins in nature, in wilderness, in the shared community of life.

What if light, say, is not simply a symbol, or linguistic metaphor, for revelation, but a phenomenon without which we would not have been able to conceive of revelation? What if rock is not just a poetic or commercial image for permanence, strength, and reliability, but the actual experiential source of such concepts? And what about notions like resurrection—one of the oldest of religious concepts and central to Christianity? As has been suggested many times, it is not coincidental that Easter is celebrated near the vernal equinox. It is a serious question, and one worth investigation, whether the concept of resurrection and all of its spiritual connotations would have been possible without the existence of seeds and the experience of spring. One could go on and ask similar questions: for instance, what effect birdsong has had on human consciousness, or whether the concept of restlessness would have the same meaning for us without the experience of the ocean.

But we began with stars, so let us return to them. Asimov’s “Nightfall” is, in the end, a story about the experience of the stars in the heavens, though a far different experience than we have here on earth. Stars, as symbols and metaphors in philosophy, religion, and poetry, have been at least as important as roses. And just as roses have been primarily symbols of love and beauty, so stars, it seems, have been primarily symbols of steadfastness, revelation, and desire (the etymological root of desire literally means “to reach for a star”):

But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
     —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores . . .
     —John Keats, “Bright Star”

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
     —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

When you wish upon a star,
Makes no difference who you are.
Everything your heart desires
Will come to you.
     —Jiminy Cricket, “When You Wish upon a Star”

One might, in view of what I have been suggesting, wonder, say, whether the idea of steadfastness and all its ethical relatives—loyalty, faithfulness, constancy, persistence, dedication, etc.—would have been possible without stars. Would we have been able to imagine steadfastness, the virtue of it, without the stars?

“Nightfall” is a harrowing story because it posits just such a world of alternative mental states shaped by a radically different universe. Moreover, it suggests other cosmic scenarios: What if, instead of living in a world with the steady, dependable, nightly, stately, ordered appearance of the stars, we lived in one that was more like Van Gogh’s famous painting Starry Night, in which our night sky was a wild spin of constantly swirling fireballs—comets, streaming meteors, northern lights, spiraling galaxies—a psychedelic display of celestial pyrotechnics which, like Van Gogh’s mind, expressed a cosmic restlessness, a chaotic and unanchored spin of creative energy? Imagine, if you will, a sky like that, night after night, millennium after millennium. Would we have lost not only poems like Shakespeare’s and Keats’s, but also the ability even to conjure up—and therefore imitate, strive for—a state of steady and unwavering purpose, devotion, resolve, and commitment—all words we value highly in our “inner” lives? What would human life have been—what would we be—beneath such frenzied skies?

Or, to posit a different alternative, what if we lived on a planet like Mercury, which always keeps one face toward the sun and the other in perpetual night? Think of how different our inner, spiritual life might be if we had no experience of, could not conceive of, such things as the coming of dawn, of daybreak. It would never be darkest before the dawn. Thoreau could never have said that “the Sun is but a morning star.” Church congregations would never sing, Fast falls the eventide. Elementary school choruses would never warm the hearts of doting parents with endless renditions of “Morning Has Broken.” There could never be a “dark night of the soul.” Nor could one ever experience the coming of dawn, which, I am suggesting, may be the original source for the emotion of hope.

All of this brings to mind the conclusion of Henry Beston’s great book The Outermost House, first published in 1928, which chronicles a year he spent living by himself in a small cottage on the ocean beach of Cape Cod. The book’s final paragraph has become somewhat famous through its appearance on posters in college dorm rooms and its frequent use by environmental groups. Here it is:

Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature. A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man . . . Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.

I have loved these words since I first read them, many years ago, for their intense lyricism, stately rhythms, and generosity of spirit. But in the light of what I have been trying to say in this essay, I read them somewhat differently. It seems to me now that Beston is making not only a beautiful statement, but a literal one. It seems to me that he means precisely what he says.

Photo: Sergii Tsololo