Read Exuberance: The Passion for Life for Free Online

exult in the return of spring, to venerate the renewal of life.
    Our response to the return of light is joy, and in that joy we recognize our beholdenness to the natural world. We believe in spring because we know we can, but we are experienced enough as a species not to take it entirely for granted. Joy recognizes these moments of uncertainty as certainly as it recognizes the glories of spring. “There was only—spring itself,” wrote Willa Cather in
My Ántonia
, “the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive.… If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.” It comes in fits and starts, and we respond in kind. But we know it is spring.
    Not only spring, but its passing into the long days of summer,has been cause for exuberant festivals. May Day, still celebrated in many places, albeit in a dampened way, was once one of the most riotously joyful occasions of the rural year. Festive bonfires were lit on the hills and young men and women went “a-maying” and followed the sounds of horns into the woods to cut down branches; these they decorated with flowers and hung over the windows and doors of their homes. Hoops were covered with greens and ribbons and laced with flowers, and May carols were sung. Maypoles, symbols of fertility, were cut from trees and garnished with bits of ribbons and cloth, leaves, colored eggshells, and bright flowers; villagers plaited ribbons as they danced around the maypole, celebrating the renewal of nature. “The earth/Puts forth new life again,” wrote Langston Hughes. “The wonder spreads.”
    May Day ceremonies, and those enacted later on Midsummer Day, are rejoicings in the fullness of orchards and crops, days white with blossom and open to hope and possibility: “With the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves,” wrote Scott Fitzgerald in
The Great Gatsby
, “I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” The seasons of nature become the seasons and convictions of man. We celebrate spring because the sun is back, May because the trees and plants are flush, and the finish of harvest because the corn and apples are picked, the livestock ready. As days shorten and darkness dominates, we turn to midwinter fires or Christmas festivities for warmth and an assurance of the continuity of life. The joyousness of Christmas has few equals, and most of its great carols are no less exuberant than the exultant hymns of Easter—“the dark night wakes, the glory breaks,” rings out the carol, “And Christmas comes once more.”
    From our dependence upon nature evolved senses and emotions able to respond to its danger, beauty, and opportunity. We are by our nature, by these adaptations, urgently connected to the natural world. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” observed JohnMuir, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” The hitching is the critical thing. Exuberance, as we shall see, makes the hitching stronger and the exploration of the universe more likely: it fuels anticipation; overlooks or minimizes risks and hardships; intensifies the joy once the exploration is done; and sharply increases the desire to recapture the joy, which in turn encourages further forays into the unknown. Those most enthusiastic and energetic in their responses to nature tend to be those who most profit from it in pleasure. They are also those most likely to expand their minds to comprehend it. The physicist Richard Feynman was certainly one of these. “The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination,” he said. “Stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star.” We are part of nature; we come from the