The last page of this delightful little volume (portable enough for holiday reading) tells us that the typeface is Arno, an Old-style serif typeface in the classic Venetian tradition, designed by Robert Slimbach at Adobe. The aesthetics of the reading experience are presumably part of Usher’s attempt to recapture a proper relationship between the reader and the beauty of the natural world. The joy of reading this book is enhanced by the way that the author situates himself within a classic tradition of advice on how to live well. Reading such a book on paper, and not storing it in the cloud, is, we should also note, cleaner and greener: no batteries, no data centres churning out their emissions.
Usher assembles a smorgasbord of elegant and wise quotations from thinkers and cultural revolutionaries of the past. The range and coverage is huge. The history of ideas offers many great examples of thinkers who recognised that simpler is better, less is more, and low tech is better than high tech, Usher suggests.
Usher writes not just about ancient thinkers, though he cites many, from Heraclitus to the Stoics. The bulk of the book is not directly engaging with those ancient writers, but rather with their early modern and modern successors who turned to those ancient thinkers for inspiration. The book is built round manifold quotations of such authors who were inspired by classical learning. Many are mentioned only briefly, from Engels and Nietzsche to Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) and Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015). However, major sections and chapters are devoted to Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, John Ruskin, Georges Bataille and others.
It’s not a quick or easy read. The sheer number of unfamiliar names and theories, cultural genealogies, references to contemporary debates and scientific ideas—most of them unfamiliar to classicists—makes it hard work. Nor does Usher really provide an argument or any critical engagement with the ideas. The mode of delivery is more sampling than investigation, more meditation than dissection. Even the expression “in accordance with nature” is not really examined, although Usher acknowledges that “Nature” is a polyvalent concept (xv-xvii).
Usher is placing himself in a diadoche of great minds who recommended a self-aware choice of simpler ways of life. In his personal life he practises what he preaches, both in academic commitments (working in Geosciences and the Environmental Program at Vermont, not just classics) and in his life as a farmer in Shoreham, Vermont. Other books include How to Care about Animals, How to Be a Farmer, Plato’s Pigs and Other Ruminations (2020) and How to Travel: An ancient guide for the modern tourist (2026).
In many places, I would have welcomed more resistance and critique of the material, and engagement with potential objections. In Chapter 2, Usher uses the word “instinctively” to translate kata phusin, where Plato claims that dogs naturally recognise what is familiar. He then suggests that kata phusin literally means “in accordance with Nature” (i.e. macroscopic Nature). But why think that Plato means, or that the word “literally” means, that? The phrase clearly means “according to (their own) nature”, so “instinctively” was correct. There is no justification for thinking that Plato is extending the term oikeios to render the whole of nature oikeion to the agent. In fact the point seems to be the opposite. The dogs reject what is outside their sphere. They do not treat what was alien as familiar. Similarly, I would pick a fight against the decision to translate oikeiosis as proprioception (p.79).
On page 81, Usher associates recursive thinking and self-interest with rational thinking, and emotions with irrationality. None of this is discussed or defended, and arguably all of it is irrelevant. Self-preservation and self-interest are not necessarily rational choices, recursive thinking has nothing to do with rationality, while coldly rational responses without emotion are almost always pathological and destructive. What is the basis of the claim that “we tend not to think for the long term or the bigger picture”? I see no support for these wildly dogmatic assumptions. They evidently restrict the conclusions that Usher can draw on page 82. Would being less rational be better? Almost certainly yes, I would say. Living in accordance with nature is about feeling in tune with all that is (with us) part of nature. It is not helped by trying to stand aside from nature, or looking rationally at nature, as if it were some alien object towards which we must formulate a relation.
On the flyleaf is an epigraph: “Progress may have been all right once, but it went on too long.” (Ogden Nash 1902-1971). But maybe this is progress: to learn to look back and remember how good it was before.
