单选题
At the tail end of the 19th century, Friedrich
Nietzsche suggested that natural history—which he saw as a war against fear and
superstition—ought to be narrated "in such a way that everyone who hears it is
irresistibly inspired to strive after spiritual and bodily health and vigour",
and he grumbled that artists had yet to discover the right language to do
this. "None the less," Nietzsche admitted, "the English have
taken admirable steps in the direction of that ideal ... the reason is that they
[natural history books] are written by their most distinguished scholars—whole,
complete and fulfilling natures." The English language
tradition of nature writing and narrating natural history is gloriously rich,
and although it may not make any bold claims to improving health and wellbeing,
it does a good job—for readers and the subjects of the writing. Where the
insights of field naturalists meet the legacy of poets such as Clare,
Wordsworth, Hughes and Heaney, there emerges a language as vivid as any cultural
achievement. That this language is still alive and kicking and
read every day in a newspaper is astounding. So to hold a century's worth of
country diaries is, for an interloper like me, both an inspiring and humbling
experience. But is this the best way of representing nature, or is it a cultural
default? Will the next century of writers want to shake loose from this
tradition? What happens next? Over the years, nature writers
and country diarists have developed an increasingly sophisticated ecological
literacy of the world around them through the naming of things and an
understanding of the relationships between them. They find ways of linking
simple observations to bigger issues by remaining in the present, the
particular. For writers of my generation, a nostalgia for lost wildlife and
habitats and the business of bearing witness to a war of attrition in the
countryside colours what we're about. The anxieties of future generations may
not be the same. Articulating the "wild" as a qualitative
character of nature and context for the more quantitative notion of biodiversity
will, I believe, become a more dynamic cultural project. The re-wilding of lands
and seas, coupled with a re-wilding of experience and language, offers fertile
ground for writers. A response to the anxieties springing from climate change,
and a general fear of nature answering our continued environmental injustices
with violence, will need a reassessment of our feelings for the nature we
like—cultural landscapes, continuity, native species—as well as the nature we
don't like—rising seas, droughts, "invasive" species. Whether
future writers take their sensibilities for a walk and, like a pack of wayward
dogs unleashed, let them loose in hills and woods to sniff out some fugitive
truth hiding in the undergrowth, or choose to honestly recount the
this-is-where-I-am, this-is-what-I-see approach, they will be hitched to the
values implicit in the language they use. They should challenge these.
Perhaps they will see our natural history as a contributor to the
commodification of nature and the obsessive managerialism of our times. Perhaps
they will see our romanticism as a blanket thrown over the traumatised victim of
the countryside. But maybe they will follow threads we found in the writings of
others and find their own way to wonder.
单选题
The major theme of the passage is about ______.
A. the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
B. the development of the discipline of natural history
C. the English language tradition of nature writing
D. the style of nature writing and country diaries