January 11, 2005

Fear is oneness

One of the outdoor-gear catalogs that clog my mailbox recently advertised, "Get close to nature, but not too close." The product advertised was a sleeping pad.

Then there was novelist Geoffrey Household's approach. In his thriller Watcher in the Shadows (1960), the protagonist, a former British Ww 2 spy, is being stalked by an assassin in the English countryside. He thinks, "I believe that for the animal always, and for man sometimes, fear is only a vivid awareness of one's unity with nature."

It's one of few spy novels set in a realistically described outdoor setting, where wildlife plays a role in the plot.

The movie adaptation was Deadly Harvest, which moved the action to California and made it a Cold War movie.

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