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Friday
Primatologist Jane Goodall, who opened our eyes to the complexity of chimpanzees and so much more, died Wednesday at 91. As National Public Radio summed up her life,
While living among chimpanzees in Africa decades ago, Goodall documented the animals using tools and doing other activities previously believed to be exclusive to people, and also noted their distinct personalities. Her observations and subsequent magazine and documentary appearances in the 1960s transformed how the world perceived not only humans’ closest living biological relatives but also the emotional and social complexity of all animals, while propelling her into the public consciousness.
And then there’s this Goodall observation, made four years ago:
Out there in nature by myself, when you’re alone, you can become part of nature and your humanity doesn’t get in the way. It’s almost like an out-of-body experience when suddenly you hear different sounds and you smell different smells and you’re actually part of this amazing tapestry of life.
Goodall takes up this theme in “The Old Wisdom,” written (I believe) in 2014. One can’t read her advice to “go out and seek your soul” without thinking how she herself went out into the wilds of Tanzania—the Gombe Stream National Park—to study chimpanzee communities. In doing so, discovered “the Eternal I.”
The Old Wisdom
By Jane Goodall
When the night wind makes the pine trees creak
And the pale clouds glide across the dark sky,
Go out my child, go out and seek
Your soul: The Eternal I.
For all the grasses rustling at your feet
And every flaming star that glitters high
Above you, close up and meet
In you: The Eternal I.
Yes, my child, go out into the world; walk slow
And silent, comprehending all, and by and by
Your soul, the Universe, will know
Itself: the Eternal I.
I like how one has to read line three of the second stanza twice, first as a continuation of the second line but then in conjunction with what follows in the third. The star glitters “high above you” but then “above you” can be joined to the contrasting “close up,” so that the two “meet in you.” This joining of the vast and the small, flaming star and “grasses rustling at your feet,” reminds me of the opening lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
I am also put in mind of the final lines of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Each and All”:
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pinecones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird; —
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
Goodall yielded herself to the perfect whole and, in the process, discovered the Eternal I, both in herself and in all of us.
