A habit of mine is to get outside to walk a few miles every day; it lifts the spirit, and clears the mind. Usually I am in one of Cape Cod’s remoter precincts, so I walk a favorite hilly trail in the pine-woods; but sometimes I am in New York, and I take my walk, as I did this afternoon, in Prospect Park.
The two experiences are very different, as you’d imagine. The woodland trail in the Outer Cape is a tiny track through the forest; although I know that others walk it, in the years I’ve been on it I’ve only ever encountered another person a handful of times. The knob-and-kettle terrain is carpeted with pine needles, and if there is no wind it can be eerily silent, save for the distant susurration of waves lapping at the western shore. The view opens from time to time to give a glimpse of the 25-mile expanse of Cape Cod Bay, and of the great arc of the Cape up to Provincetown. The sea-washed air is usually cool and wholesome — though in the winter, when the trail is covered in snow, and the northwest wind roars across the bay, it can be bitter.
This sort of solitude in the woods is, for those with a taste for it, food and drink for the soul; the connection with Nature’s immensities of time and space is direct, but all around you are the little here-and-nows of the living world in the present moment: wildflowers, miniature greenscapes of lichens and mosses, the birds wheeling overhead, and of course the trees themselves, both upright and fallen.
The walk in Prospect Park is a very different business. The Park itself is a beautiful creation: the crowning achievement of the great Frederick Law Olmstead. It is, too, in its statues, monuments, and architectural adornments, a book of history, both aesthetic and biographical. But unlike my trail in the Wellfleet woods, it is an artifact, a work of man. And there is no solitude here: Man, in all his variety, is everywhere.
This is, for someone like me, a healthy thing. Out here in the sequestered cogitorium of neoreaction, we meditate on the Long Now: the great tapestry of the civilizations men have wrought, and the patterns and principles we can wring from it. When we turn our eyes outward, it is to focus our instruments on the passing scene, to make the day’s observations, and to test their fit against our models. Solitude, such as I find in the piney forest, is good for such reflection and meditation. Ultimately, though, the object is human life: what we are, how we flourish, what we can know about ourselves, and what we should be living for. In Prospect Park these things are no longer the abstractions they can be in the stillness of the forest.
On this bright cold day in April, as I was nearing the end of my walk, I heard a rumbling sound behind me, and some youthful voices. I turned to look, and saw a trio of young men in baseball uniforms, rolling a bag of equipment, and heading for the ballfields.
What makes civilizations come into being, grow old, and die? What things can we know, and how can we know that we know them? How ought we to live? How ought people justly to be governed? Who laid the foundations of the world? What does it mean to be conscious? Have we souls? Do we continue?
All good questions. But today I was reminded that it is April in Brooklyn, and that it’s time, once again, to play ball.