Watching it happen, the evangelist Lorenzo felt depressed by Audubon’s killing of the bird because Lorenzo had felt love for the bird, even though he had only seen the bird for a moment before Audubon killed it.
In Eudora Welty’s story, A Still Moment, the student scientist and artist Audubon shot and killed a white heron so that he could gaze upon it long enough to sketch it, to paint it, to study it. In No Place for You, My Love, Eudora Welty described the dance between a man and a woman as “imperviousness in motion.” She wrote, “Surely even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost….They were what their separate hearts desired that day, for themselves and each other.” It is a kind of immunity, even though it is only partial. Perhaps it is a mercy given by a strange attentiveness. Whether born of Nature, or God, or both, we are, ourselves, impervious. It is fixed, unless it is changed in eternity, in another life. The way of life and death is fixed it is part of the impervious order that is the cosmos. And yet, in the end (as at death) we know, or we discover, that God is not moved by our pleas for life, nor by our best bargains. Scriptures, traditions and many who confess faith today tell us God is moved by our feelings and arguments. This paradox of Nature is the same as the divine paradox. It is a strange attentiveness, or a strange indifference. And yet, Darwin also wrote that Nature selects for the good of each being that she tends. Emotional appeals and argument mean nothing to natural selection.ĭarwin lamented and praised the indifference of Nature.
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