"For many of us today open spaces have become an icon for an age increasingly hemmed in by the growth of the industrial state. We look to the clear air and emptiness they offer to give us sustenance — a sustenance that in the past was supplied by traditional religious doctrines, whether Christian or otherwise. Like it or not, wilderness and deserts, mountain summits and Nordic wastes — wherever they might be — have become a substitute for the temples and cathedrals of old. They allow us the opportunity to celebrate our essential unity with nature and with what Henry Corbin termed the 'interworld.' I have tried to explore this interworld by the way of the 'eternal contrast' that Montesquieu spoke of when he attempted to analyze the moeurs of eighteenth-century France.

"We should never forget how important the wild world of nature is as a tonic to the soul. Religious doctrine may give form to the great metaphors, the myths and rites that govern our lives. It may grant us mystical insight by the way of ascetic disciplines such as those experience by St. John of the Cross, Maximus the Confessor or Dante. It may even lead us along paths of spiritual enlightenment whereby we personally attain a deeper sense of well-being, even bliss. But it is to the earth upon which we walk that we should occasionally look if we are to preserve our intellectual and spiritual heritage. If we destroy this because of our intensity to it as a metaphysical environment, we are in danger of destroying ourselves.

"This is the great lesson all traditional peoples can teach us: how to protect who we are by protecting what made us. As one old tribesman remarked to me, 'If we do not sing the songs, the animals will go away. Then we will all die.' Clearly the act of expressing the connateness between man and earth is important to the survival of all species. Letters from a Wild State, I hope, is about reviving the gift of song, about celebrating wild simplicities, about hanging onto what we are in danger of losing. My own belief is that we must generate a new enthusiasm for the rediscovery of the interworld — even if it means resorting to the unorthodox."