The Primal Place

One day people will realize that Robert Finch is the greatest nature writer of our time. He is a competent naturalist - he easily identifies animals, plants and other natural phenomena with their scientific names; he is a keen observer - he notices the intricate details of the objects of his observation; and he is also an excellent writer - all the scientific lingo are woven seamlessly into his writing, and the details are always accurate, vivid and never boring. Compared with some of his near-contemporaries, Mr. Finch is also more humane, tolerant and even personable. Aldo Leopold essentially only wrote one book (albeit a very good one), and he was too much of a hunter, always trigger happy; Edward Abbey writes with pungency, but he was often ornery and undoubtedly a misanthrope; Joseph Wood Krutch was too detached, too distant in his writing; Anne Dillard was prone to prolonged and irrelevant theological rambling. As to this book, as Mr. Finch said, it is his favorite, the best "book book" (as opposed to a collection of loosely related essays) he has written. In the first part of the book, "Digging in", the setting is centered around his house in Brewster, Cape Cod: the house itself, the garden, the adjacent cemetery, the roads, Punkhorn. In the second part, "Going out", the author ambles to the nearby surroundings: the brooks, ponds, seashores and "The Landing". Mr. Finch writes about the natural phenomena: the herring run, the woodchuck in his garden, the stranded marine animals on the beach, etc., but he also writes about the people and the human history of the land. In his words, this is not a static place, but "a landscape in motion". Although Mr. Finch lived in Cape Cod for years, the book vaguely suggests the continuation and changing of seasons of one single year (interestingly, the book itself was written in a year) - it starts in about early Spring, then rolls into summer, fall, winter, and finally ends in early Spring again. This and the geographical concentricity are perhaps what give the books a cohesive theme and the reason why Mr. Finch says that it is a "book book". They also remind one of Walden, which without a doubt has influenced Mr. Finch's writing and perhaps also his philosophy.