Excerpt from 
The Painter: A Novel of Pursuit by Stephen Denning

     During the night, there’s an utterly terrifying thunderstorm. It begins quietly enough with the wind rattling the windowpanes. Then the house begins to shudder as it’s buffeted by sudden gusts. 
      Each hour, the storm gathers force, with heightened thrusting and whistling of the wind. Leaves and small branches fly past the window. Outside, the trees are waving like blades of long grass, as the squall thrashes and roars.
       Nature’s mood tonight is cataclysmic raw violence. Massive jolts of lightning crackle, and thunderclaps follow almost instantaneously. Timber cracks and branches crash to the ground. At one point, an errant limb hits a window in the living room. For more than an hour, I’m a creature, huddled in a cave, wondering at the wrath of God.
       By the dawn’s early light, the storm has blown over, and I go outside to examine the damage. A huge branch has landed just next to the house. The main weight missed the living room by no more than six feet.
                      From The Painter: A Novel of Pursuit, page 45

     In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God are formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude towards nature. Sex is the natural in man.
                         Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, Vintage, 1991.

                                      I have learned 
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity, 
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things.
                     William Wordsworth
                    Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

     But let nature shrug, and all is in ruin. Fire, flood, lightning, tornado, hurricane, volcano, earthquake - anywhere at any time. Disaster falls upon the good and bad. Civilized life requires a state of illusion. The idea of the ultimate benevolence of nature and God is the most potent of man's survival mechanisms. Without it, culture would revert to fear and despair.
                        Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, Vintage, 1991.

                                               This is an art
Which does mend nature - change it rather - but
The art itself is nature.

     William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, IV, iv, 96.

     We tend to associate Romans with blood sports in the arena, rather than gardens and a love of nature -- forgetting for example the even less obvious Turkish passion for tulips.
                             Peter Walcott

     A landscape does not exist in its own right... For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere that gives objects their true value.
                            Claude Monet

     Learn about the pine from the pine; learn about the bamboo from the bamboo.
                           Basho

     Nature excites the imagination to representation.
                          Matisse

     Happy are those who sing with all their heart, from the bottoms of their hearst. To find joy in the sky, the trees, the flowers. There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
                          Matisse

     See Stephen Denning, The Painter, A Novel of Pursuit, (iUniverse, October 2000) 

     Stephen Denning, Sonnets 2000, (iUniverse, October 2000)