Beebop Beach

Lovers of wisdom on the East End, let us consider nature. Before animals became specimens for scientific inquiry, they were emulated as examples of how to live right. Such totemistic education was necessary for even the most well-attuned hunter-gatherers, because alienation is the inescapable cost of being human. Having “eaten from the Tree of Knowledge,” we rational animals have dramatically extended the deliberative pause between impulse and action, outsmarting competing species but acquiring the fraught capacity to judge ourselves from an imaginary, external perspective. Self-consciousness is “original sin” because it is the very condition that makes the concept of sin possible. Right and wrong are judgements made from a standpoint that is removed from the instinctive immediacy represented by the Garden. Our exaggerated thinking has also made us fallible in the literal sense: We fall down. Human beings second-guess their decisions and stumble over obstacles, no longer making those unconscious mental calculations that result in the smooth grace of animal motion. We are uniquely tragic and hilarious.

My wife’s cat Iris, to whom I was intensely allergic, used to invariably jump on my lap as I sat at my desk attempting to think deep thoughts. What always impressed me as I removed her (never, of course, with imperiling force) was how well she took it in stride, the way her landing seamlessly incorporated the momentum and direction she was sent. Like a jazz musician in 1957 heading to a gig at the Village Vanguard, she would saunter toward a destination that seemed to have been intended all along. Nature sets the edifying example of how sameness and difference, one and many, can be perfectly mediated, how something can remain true to its invariant core while accommodating variation. This is just the unpredictable coherence we hope to hear from the improvising soloist playing through chord changes. A natural landscape is the living portrait of such integrity spanning geological time.

We put up with the teeming hordes that descend upon the Hamptons each summer to live in (cost-prohibitive) proximity to some of the most exquisite natural spots in the world. Like moths, estranged urbanites are irresistibly drawn to the beach light, so famously prized by painters. Through its myriad variations — time of day, weather, season — the luminosity of the South Fork retains an unmistakably unique quality, like the texture of fond memories.

Equally alluring is the distinctive dune grass, its root systems stabilizing what would otherwise dissolve, its presence the visible signature of a landscape holding its own measure against the incomprehensible power of the Atlantic. But the true aesthetic treasures are to be found on the bay side — in the view of Northwest Harbor, for example, with its combination of coastal ponds, bluffs, salt marsh, woodland, and open water, one can see an inspiring image of the unified diversity and resilience of the nature within us.