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ot Man Apart. For a 1965 Sierra Club
photo book, the environmental activist David Brower took this title from
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). A mind-cleansing rightness strikes home if we
hear those three spare words the way they actually occur in his poem. Praising
“Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things,” Jeffers then says: “Love
that, not man / Apart from that”—a loaded line break! (plate 11)
Ansel Adams found Jeffers “a strange presence with his rugged features and
relentless glance” when they met in 1926. Later he told Alfred Stieglitz he hoped
“to call attention to the simplicities of environment... to ‘the enormous beauty
of the world,’ as Jeffers writes. Pray for me.” His photographs of California’s
Big Sur coast are featured in Not Man Apart, and Adams mostly turned his lens
on the nonhuman world.
Jeffers deplores the “contagion” of selfish humanity on our planet,
But who is our judge? It is likely the enormous
Beauty of the world requires for completion our ghostly increment.
Less hangs on “Beauty” here than on “enormous,” the cosmos in which human-
ity is a late and transient addition. Not “man / Apart,” he wrote, and this too:
The coast hills at Sovranes Creek;
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;“not man / Apart”
Ocean, Rock, Hawk, and Robinson Jeffers
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