"In common things are greater extensions of ourselves than we ever conceived of."

"Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult," observes John Hay, naturalist, essayist, sage, and inveterate walker of byways. This collection from the 50-year long career of America's preeminent nature writer illustrates the full range of Hay's work. An elegant and lyrical stylist, he is, in Merrill's words, "the nature writer's writer, an illustrator of the Emersonian notion that 'the world is emblematic.'"

And so Hay reveals the ubiquitous but often unnoticed emblems all...

This book offers a major reconceptualization of the term ?audience,? including the landscape of a given audience?the situated and territorializing features of any way of seeing and defining the world. Given de Certeau's hypothesis that listening, watching, and reading all occur in places and result in produce transformed paths or spaces, the contri