The Forest of Arden.
- Mark Heiser
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Recently, my wife and I made one of our periodic pilgrimages into Rocky Mountain National Park. It is late October, and most of the tourists are gone. The air is chilled but tolerable, and the Trail Ridge Road is closed for winter. Regrettably, the Federal government shutdown is also dragging on, which Park Rangers euphemistically call a "lapse in appropriations." Kudos to them for their perseverance and commitment to the Park as they continue their essential tasks unpaid. In any case, we felt mostly as if we had the Park to ourselves. Undoubtedly, countless essays, poems, prose, photographs, and paintings have been created to honor the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. None compare to the real thing. They are sublime.
Back in the day, the word "sublime" had a different connotation than it has today. The mid-19th century understanding of the sublime was heavily influenced by the Romantic movement and philosophers like Burke and Kant, as well as painters of the Hudson River School (of which Bierstadt above was one of the major artists.) They saw it as an aesthetic experience rooted in vast, powerful, and untamed nature. This encounter with the infinitely great exposed the limits of human senses and combined the feelings of awe and terror. Awe at the infinite magnificence, and terror at our relative insignificance within it. The 19th-century sublime was a metaphysical experience that ultimately led to the observer's sense of transcendence and self-affirmation. Our contemporary watered-down version of the sublime has largely lost its intense philosophical distinction. Nowadays it serves as a middling superlative, applied to mundane things like a fine glass of wine.
In his play As You Like It, Shakespeare uses the Forest of Arden as a means of transcendence and transformation. The forest is described as a place of natural beauty, full of lush greenery, trees, and wildlife, in contrast to the artificial and often deceitful court life. And yet there is danger:
A wretched, ragged man, o’ergrown with hair,
Lay sleeping on his back. About his neck
A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself,
Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached
The opening of his mouth. But suddenly,
Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself
And, with indented glides, did slip away
Into a bush, under which bush’s shade
A lioness, with udders all drawn dry,
Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch
When that the sleeping man should stir—for ’tis
The royal disposition of that beast
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.
This seen, Orlando did approach the man
And found it was his brother, his elder brother.
IV., 3.
Oliver, who sought to murder his own brother, is transformed upon entering the forest after being saved by Orlando from the snake and the lioness. Duke Frederick, on his way to harass the exiles, encounters a holy man in the forest and converts to a life of contemplation, giving up his dukedom. Such examples of transformation were made possible in part because the characters were confronted by the wonders and dangers of the Forest of Arden.
And to the skirts of this wild wood he came,
Where, meeting with an old religious man,
After some question with him, was converted
Both from his enterprise and from the world;
His crown bequeathing to his banish'd brother,
And all their lands restor'd to them again
That were with him exil'd.
V., 4.
The message here is that if you are feeling uncertain, uncentered, or unmoored in your career, it's time to cast off the corruption of the court and take a walk in the woods. There are 30 states that have National Parks, and all 50 states have a State Park. Find your Forest of Arden, commune with the natural world, and be inspired by the wonders of the sublime.
