Along with poets, philosophers, and deep ecologists, nature writers--who may be something of all three--address the world alienation of western civilization. By example as well as with words, they teach us to turn from the self to the world, from ego to ecos. In these deeply felt meditative essays, Sherman Paul contemplates the cosmological homecoming of nature writers who show us how to reenter the world, participate in it, and recover respect for it.In For Love of the World Sherman Paul considers Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, major writers in the American tradition of nature writing; Henry Beston and Loren Eiseley, writers not yet so canonical; and Richard Nelson and Barry Lopez, our estimable contemporaries. Paul includes focal works seldom treated, among them Thoreau's Cape Cod, Muir's A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, Beston's Northern Farm, Eiseley's poems, Lopez's stories, and Nelson's ethnological studies.All these writers are concerned, as Thoreau was, with the Emersonian doctrine of correspondence, whose cosmological and literary aspects they accept, amend, or reject. They give over the transcendental for the descendental, the abstract and universal for the concrete and particular. They turn to animals and hunting, shamanism and "primitive" people, and what Gary Snyder calls "the practice of the wild" in order to recover--and teach us to recover--some of the essential relationships and the enchantment that have been lost in the course of human history.Paul's meditative mode follows the practice of naturalists who enter the field, come into the open, and relate their immediate experiences. In the most primary and direct way, his essays belong to our moment in history when nothing is more essential than our reattachment to earthly existence. They will reawaken our love of the world--the necessary eros of ecos--and our wonder at and gratitude for being. Read Less