What a Trip to the Wood Recycling Tells You About Wordsworth

It’s a simple question: before Wordsworth wrote his parts of Preface and ruined everything, was simple living actually an exploration of transcendence?

It’s a Tuesday morning and Matt and I are digging through the wood recycling in the mud when a white truck spilling old wood shakes up and the passengers get out to unload. It’s rather a fascinating dialogue. A sort of rapid-fire exchange of contractions. Some highlights: ‘el not want that f***r. ‘pen the gate. S***er’ll lie.

Metrically but not metaphysically interesting.

And then after, I go home to a housemate reading Wendell Berry, rhapsodizing about the socio-economic implications of agricultural done well, and the transcendent truths brought to us by rivers. Wordsworth seemed to think that education by the woods happened on accident. Or it happened all the time, and all someone needed to do was jump into dirt to find Nature God. The conversation I overheard at the wood recycling suggests that this is not the case. But then, there is Berry, and the fact that nature interpreted can provide certain instructions.

Let’s ignore, for a moment, that it might be the case those values are layered onto nature and not drawn out of it.

Wordsworth is rather a tricky rhetorician: he suggests that Nature be chosen over urban complication for its ethical instruction. But Nature only works if the urban model of inquiry is brought into it. That being the case, Wordsworth is almost a brilliant chap: in writing Preface, he establishes a structure according to which his point is true. Not true because working at the wood recycling will make you a good poet, but true because a person who has already been in the city, a person who would read Wordsworth, would likely find philosophy in the woods.