Nature Isn’t Natural: The Same Old Thing      Modernists typically embrace modernity as practitioners of artifice­­, scribes of interiority, and devotees to presentism as in Ezra Pound’s ‘make it new,’ Ernest Hemingway’s ‘make it cold,’ Gertrude Stein’s ‘make it as it is made,’ and earlier Charles Baudelaire’s ‘make it good and cold.’ Others, for example William Faulkner and Knut Hamsun, do the same but also resist modernity as naturalists, chroniclers of exteriority, and servants to the Eternal. For most, essentialism and nature are deadly constructs to be disassembled while others seek to reunite an alienated modern with a “Nature,” human or otherwise. The modernist stands relative to the Nature-concept: pro, con, or a straddling twixt poles.      Baudelaire writes in The Painter of Modern Life , “Nature teaches us nothing, […] the good is always the product of some art” (800). His indictment of Nature squares with philosophers of antiquity --, the Stoic Seneca and Cynic Diogenes among others. Despite the Stoic and Cynic way to virtue as ‘follow nature,’ Seneca notes, “nature does not give a man virtue: the process of becoming a good man is an art” (176).      It’s the same old new thing -- only different.      Lena, a Faulkner character in Light In August is invariably viewed by critics as natural, innocent, and wholesome. Consequently, she is called virtuous. She is unequivocally natural, innocent, and wholesome but doubtfully “virtuous.”  Light In August’s Joe Christmas is more capable of virtue. Why?  It is not natural to follow nature, according to Seneca, though to do so with deliberation is the way to virtue. For both Baudelaire and Seneca, the “good” or practiced “virtue” is produced by artifice. Seneca aligns with Baudelaire who avers, “Everything beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.” Lena’s innocence is steeped in nature lacking the reason and calculation of Joe Christmas. Lena is ignorant of artifice,and accordingly, incapable of practiced virtue.       “Crime is natural,” says Baudelaire. He continues, “Virtue […] is artificial, to be taught to animalized humanity, man being powerless to discover it by himself” (800-801).  The claim chimes with Seneca’s assertion nearly two-thousand years earlier, though for Seneca the criminal is merely mistaken and disturbed failing to follow the precepts found in nature leading to tranquility. It is not natural to follow nature, yet virtue is only obtainable in this way. The criminal Joe Christmas willfully follows nature; the innocent Lena, steeped in nature, does not.      The oft-penciled freshman marginalia “Man v. Nature” remains as vital, new, and fresh as it is ubiquitous. The idea is eternal as it is circumstantial, and the contest continues to be an interminable pounding away at what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “each string” of Fate and Power until “we learn at last its powers.” In “Fate” Emerson concludes, “This is true, and that other is true” (339). Baudelaire’s ‘modernity’ of the “ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” juxtaposed with the “other half [as] eternal and the immutable” (796) seems consonant with Emerson.      Even the antiquated Diogenes the Cynic seems to pre-sage the well-rounded modernist as both anti-modern and modern.  He chides his audience to “abandon false shame […] deface the currency,” and reject false values of a dominant culture and do so with “wordplay, biting sarcasm, and merciless witticisms” (24-27). Faulkner’s three-page sentence and Hemingway’s three-word sentence function in the same way. Faulkner, like Diogenes,set about scandalizing society; however, Diogenes demonstrated his beliefs in acts including defecation during public lectures, sexual intercourse in the streets, and deliberately eating excess beans to air a flatulent commentary on lectures he attended (120-29). He was a “cosmopolitan,” literally a citizen of the universe entrenched in city-life living within that which he opposed.      Diogenes is a vulgar ancestor of Faulkner’s Bad-Boy and the Baudelaire’s Dandy, “a lover of the universal life” and “the unstable and fugitive.” The crowd is the element for the Bad-Boy and the Dandy, as it is with Diogenes who took considerable joy in “astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished” (799).      The ends of ‘Nature and Nurture’ are like Socrates’ description of tethered cats thrown over a clothesline, similar to what Emerson has called “a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the universe.” We are always relative to this polarity, always positioned along this continuum, and as such, we represent a circumstance, the present, and forever engaged in this ancient antagonism.      Emerson says that the so-called “new views” are but the “the oldest of thoughts […] cast into the mold of these new times (192). Or, as Faulkner surmised in Requiem for a Nun, "the past is never dead. It's not even the past". And so it goes with Modernism, the new new old that is cast into a mold of these new times.   -Richard Guilfoyle-   Additional Works Consulted   Whicher, Stephen, ed. Selections From Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic   Anthology. Boston: Riverside Press, 1957. Miller, Perry, ed. The Transcendentalists. New York: MJF Books, 1978. Campbell, R., trans. Seneca: Letters From a Stoic. London: Penquin, 1969. Branham, R. Bracht, et. al. The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.