Sylvan

Pertaining to the woods; rustic (adj.)

One of the reasons I enjoy watching the television show Lost is because I have a very powerful physiological nostalgia when I see people from a developed human culture with refridgerators and central air and sepctic systems and electricity and bouncy office chairs and concrete buildings with rectangular windows--people from this place, the place I am from--running, climbing, scavenging for their lives, drinking rainwater and hunting, using only what they need and needing everything they consume. It makes me wonder about what it means to survive for creatures inside this house of culture and civilization we've created for ourselves; makes me wonder to the point where I'm wishing that survival did not mutate away from the pursuit of happiness as much as it has. It makes me want clear lines drawn separating what I need to live, from what is excessive--bceause a more basic, animal-style, lost-on-an-island kind of culture is one that, while probably difficult, has those lines. This makes me a luddite, a secessionist, a Thoreau-type of eceentric that wants to throw away the things that make life easy, comfortable, manageable, in the name of something more vague and natural and brute. Someone that wants an existence cleaner of material superficialities and more dirty from living. More full of living than inert things designed to protect me from the welter that life in its most sylvan form entails.
It's a deep longing within me, somewhere among the proteins of my gentic material, that gets a jealous pleasure from watching characters live in a way I've never lived, characters that live in a way I might always be too scared to attempt, characters living in a way I might always have to watch from the rectangular window of some concrete building.