Not for us the pristine beauty of the natural world
There is a dichotomy at the heart of the X Files, maybe one that is as human as Garry Shandling’s concern over dressing to the right or the left.
There are enough episodes in which we see a way of life disappearing, the idea of small-town America fading from the map of the modern world. As this ideal vanishes, leaving us with a nostalgia for what ought to have been, even if it never actually was, we must face the future of our urban realities, in which neighbours may never speak and walking the streets is no longer a simple stroll home.
This regret over the disappearance of small-town America expresses a deeper, more fundamental, loss – our connection with the natural world. We traversed the wide-open spaces of the land, seeking that place we could call home. Finding it, we covered it in concrete, muddied the water with our waste and discoloured the sky with our exhaust fumes. Not for us the pristine beauty of the natural world; it is a place to which we don’t belong. It is but yet another longing for something that never was.
There are, on the contrary, episodes in which the human and the animal have become as one. Ian Detweiler in ‘Alpha’, ‘The Jersey Devil’, El Chupracabra in ‘El Mundo Gira’, even the flukeman in ‘The Host’. In Season Eight’s ‘Patience’ we have another such example, this time it’s a human bat.
I have no idea if it is attributable, but I once heard it said that a man’s greatest nightmare is a dream come true.
The monsters just listed are warning enough that a dream for a pastoral idyll is but a nightmare waiting to happen. Genies can be obtuse creatures, of course, but maybe we should take note of Jen’s fulfilling of Mulder’s wish for peace on earth. A world without human beings, as well as being incredible peaceful, would also be a world without monsters.
We trammeled the wild places of the world and tamed them, made them safe. And, by doing so, made them a breeding ground for monsters who can wait forty years for their revenge. How to tell the creature is more bat than man? No human being could wait so long!
Yet, in the midst of all that is unholy, we have created such wonders and marvels and things of breath-taking beauty. John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. This laptop upon which I type. The web on which I post. So many wonders it is beyond the limits of my imagination to list even the smallest fraction.
Even that concrete with which we have plastered the land takes shape in London or the Tianjin Binhai Library in Tianjin, China.
There are those who will always believe human beings should live simpler more natural lives – back to nature and all that.
Ernie Stefaniuk hid away on a small island for over forty years, hoping to escape what he’d wrought. One can’t imagine Ernie ever contributing anything of value to the great store of human achievement.
Only in the world in which we may be called upon to fight monsters are we really able to fully become that which Ernie was willing to leave behind – human.
There are enough episodes in which we see a way of life disappearing, the idea of small-town America fading from the map of the modern world. As this ideal vanishes, leaving us with a nostalgia for what ought to have been, even if it never actually was, we must face the future of our urban realities, in which neighbours may never speak and walking the streets is no longer a simple stroll home.
This regret over the disappearance of small-town America expresses a deeper, more fundamental, loss – our connection with the natural world. We traversed the wide-open spaces of the land, seeking that place we could call home. Finding it, we covered it in concrete, muddied the water with our waste and discoloured the sky with our exhaust fumes. Not for us the pristine beauty of the natural world; it is a place to which we don’t belong. It is but yet another longing for something that never was.
There are, on the contrary, episodes in which the human and the animal have become as one. Ian Detweiler in ‘Alpha’, ‘The Jersey Devil’, El Chupracabra in ‘El Mundo Gira’, even the flukeman in ‘The Host’. In Season Eight’s ‘Patience’ we have another such example, this time it’s a human bat.
I have no idea if it is attributable, but I once heard it said that a man’s greatest nightmare is a dream come true.
The monsters just listed are warning enough that a dream for a pastoral idyll is but a nightmare waiting to happen. Genies can be obtuse creatures, of course, but maybe we should take note of Jen’s fulfilling of Mulder’s wish for peace on earth. A world without human beings, as well as being incredible peaceful, would also be a world without monsters.
We trammeled the wild places of the world and tamed them, made them safe. And, by doing so, made them a breeding ground for monsters who can wait forty years for their revenge. How to tell the creature is more bat than man? No human being could wait so long!
Yet, in the midst of all that is unholy, we have created such wonders and marvels and things of breath-taking beauty. John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. This laptop upon which I type. The web on which I post. So many wonders it is beyond the limits of my imagination to list even the smallest fraction.
Even that concrete with which we have plastered the land takes shape in London or the Tianjin Binhai Library in Tianjin, China.
There are those who will always believe human beings should live simpler more natural lives – back to nature and all that.
Ernie Stefaniuk hid away on a small island for over forty years, hoping to escape what he’d wrought. One can’t imagine Ernie ever contributing anything of value to the great store of human achievement.
Only in the world in which we may be called upon to fight monsters are we really able to fully become that which Ernie was willing to leave behind – human.
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