It is a small, remote, self-enclosed world, with something lost and forgotten about it—though visitors come to it every year from faraway places, from England and Africa and Japan, to gaze at the lonely beauty which imprisoned a great religious leader for five years. It is like coming to the end of the world, to a place shut off from the forward movement of life, where only the flash of a goldfinch and the chipmunk’s scramble and chatter seem to belong. This is high country, but the Patterson house lies cupped in obscurity.
On either side the wilderness stretches away, with a tumbledown barn where the Kidder farm once stood. Of course, it was not like this when the Pattersons lived here. There were other farms then, cornfields and pastures, a flourishing little village, a good deal more traffic on the road—enough to make Patterson take sawdust from his mill and put it on the bridge across the ravine to deaden the sound of wagon wheels which so disturbed his wife. But even then the wilderness was all around, shuffling forward to reclaim the land, nudging down stone walls and edging into the pastures with poplar and birch. Even then it was like the end of nowhere.
There were hours and days of utter solitude for Mrs. Patterson—and even nights when her husband was away and the only sound was that of the brook and the whippoorwills and perhaps the distant barking of a dog or the angry oratorio of the bullfrogs. Worst of all, there were the long snowbound winters turning the whole world into a crystal chaos, a formless, frozen emptiness where the wind went howling crazy through the hills. Always, after these years, Mrs. Patterson would see the giant snowstorms which piled obstruction everywhere as the enemy of order, a negation of life.46
From earliest girlhood she had loved the natural world; but just as she was denied the solace of escape through culture, so she was denied the solace of escape through nature. No Wordsworthian pantheism, no mystical identification with natural forces was possible to one who felt in her own body the jarring dissonances of nature. The myth of the American Adam, or Eve, was not for her.
46 Something of what is symbolized may be suggested in the famous chapter on whiteness in Moby Dick and the chapter on snow in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.