When Kurt Vonnegut reflected on the secret of happiness, he distilled it to “the information that I’ve obtained sufficient.” And but, each as a species and as people in an industrialist, materialistic, mechanistic tradition, we live beneath the tyranny of extra — a civilizational cult we name progress. We have now forgotten who we might be, and what our world would seem like, if as an alternative we lived beneath the benediction of sufficient.
How we obtained right here, and what we’d do about it, is what photographer, author, illustrator, and wilderness information Miriam Körner explores in Fox and Bear (public library) — a love letter to nature disguised as a contemporary fable of ecological grief and hope, partway between The Iron Giant and The Forest, but totally and consummately unique, painstakingly illustrated in cut-out dioramas from reused and recycled cardboard, narrated with poetic tenderness and a ardour for chance.
Each day, Fox and Bear went into the forest to assemble what there was to assemble and to catch what there was to catch.
Day after day, the 2 buddies forage and hunt collectively, watch the solar set and hearken to the birds sing.
Life was good, thought Bear.
Selecting berries and mushrooms,
looking ants and mice,
catching rabbits and birds
stored them busy day after day.
However ultimately, these joyful actions flip into duties and the 2 buddies get seduced by the trap of efficiency — that deadening impulse to optimize and operationalize doing on the expense of being.
As Bear and Fox start gathering increasingly more seeds, catching increasingly more birds, laboring to water the seedlings and feed the birds, they abruptly discover themselves with no time to observe the sundown or hearken to birdsong.
That is how the attract of automation creeps in — Fox units about inventing mechanical technique of carrying out the every day duties, within the hope of liberating extra time for leisure: an egg collector, a hen feeder, a water sprinkler, a berry picker.
As a substitute, the other occurs because the forest begins to seem like an industrial palace evocative of the Scottish thinker John Macmurray’s cautionary remark that “we worship efficiency and success; and we do not know how to live finely.”
All this enterprise finally ends up consuming the time for leisure, subsuming the area for pleasure, affirming Hermann Hesse’s century-old admonition that “the high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”
Each day now, Fox and Bear lower down extra timber to burn within the steam engines, so the egg collector may acquire eggs and the water sprinkler would water the vegetation. At night time, they stuffed the hen feeder and stuck the berry picker and constructed extra cages till it was nearly dawn.
As Fox retains dreaming up larger and greater engines, sooner and sooner machines, Bear finds himself “so drained he had no creativeness left.”
Immediately, he wakes up from the trance of busyness and remembers how pretty it was to easily wander the forest “and collect what there may be to assemble and catch what there may be to catch.”
And, identical to that, the 2 buddies abandon the compulsions of progress and return to the basic pleasure of merely being alive — creatures amongst creatures, on a world already completely tuned for each creaturely want. We have now a finite retailer of sunsets in a life, in spite of everything.
Couple Fox and Bear with the Dalai Lama’s illustrated ethical and ecological philosophy for the next generation, then revisit the forgotten conservation pioneer William Vogt’s roadmap to civilizational survival and Denise Levertov’s stirring poem about our relationship to the natural world.
Illustrations courtesy of Miriam Körner
