Field notes: Facing Unpleasant Facts
Brown Pelican, engraved by Robert Havell (1793–1878), plate CCCCXXI in Audubon’s The Birds of America (1827– 1838). Photograph courtesy of Arader Galleries, Philadelphia. I hadn’t planned on beginning with this, but it arrived like a long slow curve ball dropping onto the front page of the New York Times: Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), the headline announced, was not guilty of rape. I didn’t need to read further to guess the backstory—grievance collectors trolling through history had no doubt seized on a court document from the Middle Ages in which the Latin word raptus appeared in conjunction with a dispute involving the poet. Ignorant of, or deliberately ignoring, the fact that the Latin word was an elastic one and in Chaucer’s case did not involve sexual assault, a game of defaming the poet was afoot . . . until a few scholars set things straight. Sad stuff, but something I think Chaucer himself would understand if he were with us today. He had a supple and sympathetic mind, and our current moment of reckonings with history—both the righteous and the reckless—would have engaged him and enlightened us. Muir: Nature Writings by John Muir (1838–1914), ed. William Cronon (1997). Photograph courtesy of the Library of America, New York. He’s not around and I’m here, reading and thinking a lot about John James Audubon (1785–1851) and a little about John Muir (1838–1914), both of whom have come in for an overdue reckoning. It’s the overdue part that bothers me, but more of that in a minute. Both the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society have wrestled with the legacy of their respective founder and namesake recently, and in the case of Audubon published a landmark essay by the
