Aldo Leopold on How to Hear the Song of Life

The point, of course, is to see the whole — what Virginia Woolf called “the thing itself.” Not just to uncover the fragments and discover how each works but to understand their harmonic unity — the sum that, as the forgotten genius Willard Gibbs knew, “is simpler than its parts,” simpler and more beautiful, the way myriad complex chords played by a vast orchestra of disparate instruments become a symphony — a single unit of transcendence. The philosopher, naturalist, and pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887–April 21, 1948) takes up this question in a wonderful essay abo...