Is the act of falling in love made any less natural by the fact that it follows the cultural scripts laid out for us in movies and literature?

Harry Shaw, professor of English, posited this analogy to explain our reactions to what he referred to as the "natural sublime" in a lecture Sept. 1.

Shaw delivered the 14th annual William H. and Jane Torrence Harder Lecture, "Is Nature Natural? A View From Britain," before some 300 people in Warren Hall Auditorium. The lecture was the first in the Cornell Plantations Fall Lecture Series; a garden party followed in the Plantations.

Some writers have claimed that our experience of "wilderness" today is nothing more than a "product of civilization," he said, and that our reactions have been passed down and propagated by "Wordsworthian sentiments" and other equally vivid cultural schemas of natural beauty. The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt, for example, suggests that though we may assume that a walk to Nevada Falls allows us to escape civilization and human culture, nothing could be further from the truth.

Shaw also quoted Bernard Williams' "Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy": "Virtually nothing in human beings is 'natural,' including the use of language ... which is itself, of course, a cultural product." But he added that this doesn't mean that a behavior or response cannot be both learned and authentic at the same time.

According to Shaw, at least part of the reason we retreat into nature is for an "antidote to the forces of modernity." It is because of this that we seek an "unmediated relationship" with nature, for if nature is not the "refuge from the encroachments of modernity" we seek, then we are betrayed by the very thing we hoped would save us from ourselves.

But Shaw stayed positive on the subject: "If (like Wordsworth's) your heart leaps up when you behold a rainbow in the sky, my advice is to let it leap without worrying about whether it's been taught to do so."

What is good about literature, Shaw concluded, is its energy: It can inspire us to think and see what we normally would not, and this is precisely what happens with the aspects of nature literature reveals to us. Such is the advantage of culture.

Shaw has been teaching at Cornell since 1978 with a focus on 19th-century British novels and narrative poetics and the rise of historical consciousness in Europe.

The Harder Lecture Series is endowed by Torrence "Torrey" Harder '65 and is named in honor of his parents.

Amanda Lomanov '12 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.