Books: The Curious World

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT (223 pp.)—Joseph Wood Krutch—William Sloane Associates ($3.75).

Americans have listened eagerly to the many-voiced cry of their continent. Seashore, mountains, valleys and plains have spoken and been heard. But the voice of the desert has been largely ignored. To the Hebrews it spoke of the one true God, to the Arabs of the stars and the science of astronomy. It is a stern, conservative voice, encouraging endurance rather than conquest. The desert shows man his limitations and turns him inward. When practical-minded men inquire, “But what is the desert good for?”, perhaps the best answer still is: “Contemplation.”

Five years ago Joseph Wood Krutch, biographer of Samuel Johnson and Henry David Thoreau, a man of letters accustomed to the Northeast, moved to an air-cooled ranch house near Tucson. Ariz.

Here he praises the saguaro, the prickly pear and the wicked cholla cactus with all the exuberance of a convert. His companions are no longer Columbia University students, whom he once taught as Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature, but creatures of the Sonoran sands —road runners, elf owls, jack rabbits, Gila monsters, tarantulas and scorpions.

Controlling Nature. Walking through the dry and sunny air, he asks himself questions: 1) Which animal first emerged from the earth into the air? 2) How does it happen that many of the weeds in

Arizona are from Asia? 3) In what mysterious way does the kangaroo rat triumph over the total absence of water?

When not pondering such puzzlers, Krutch is busy watching toads in glass jars, peering at yucca flowers with a flashlight at midnight, or driving a rattler away from a nest of hooded orioles.

His keen observations, whether of animal or plant, carry mystical overtones. He would insist with Thoreau that “this curious world which we inhabit … is more to be admired and enjoyed than it is to be used.” Indeed, he takes up the cudgels against man’s shortsighted ambition to “control nature.” That whole concept, he asserts, is false. Modern man needs greater understanding of “the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.” The idea of a world for man’s use only is unrealizable. Long ago Alexander Pope summed it up with a smile:

Know, Nature’s children all divide

her care:

The fur that warms a monarch, warmed

a bear.

Merciless Creature. Joseph Wood Krutch would let even the mountain lions and the rattlesnakes keep their own skins. In The Voice of the Desert there is only one creature he mercilessly skins alive—man, the destroyer of nature and of the natural balance. “To almost everything except man,” he writes, “the sight of man [is] the most terrifying of all sights.”

Readers will hope that Author Krutch never carries this line of thinking to its extreme conclusion—or else he might find himself spending most of his time cavorting with flocks of elf owls. That would be neither so enjoyable to himself nor so profitable to the world as the writing and reading of his delightful books.

Answers: 1) The scorpion. 2) They presumably accompanied alfalfa seed imported from Siberia and Turkistan. 3) The rat’s body manufactures water out of the hydrogen contained in food starches and from the oxygen in the air it breathes.