Opinion: Merciless Beauty
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If—in the midst of the human-scale fear of flames that gripped thousands of us last week—you had some detached instant when the terrible beauty of it struck you, you were not alone, nor were you wrong. Robinson Jeffers, the California poet of the vast and indifferent ferocity and gorgeousness of this place, wrote this:
Fire On The HillsThe deer were bounding like blown leavesUnder the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terrorOf the deer was beautiful; and when I returnedDown the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagleWas perched on the jag of a burnt pine,Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shouldersHe had come from far off for the good huntingWith fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was mercilessBlue, and the hills merciless black,The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.