Joanna Greenfield

It took almost twenty-three years to write The Lion's Eye: Seeing in the Wild, because I was so obsessed by the savannas of Africa and by their disappearance that I wrote about four thousand pages before I stopped. I had wanted to live in Africa from the time I was three, and the first year that I spent there was one continuous moment of light. I learned to see there for the first time, in spite of my flawed vision, by watching wild animals. I knew even then, though, that the savanna upon which humans had evolved was dying. We were spreading out across it in a wave of dark smoke, and the animals, which had been able to cross from one horizon to another, were fenced into ever-decreasing areas.

I went back for another year, five years later, but couldn't stay. I wandered across America instead, trying to find a place here that opens the eye and spreads the lungs, but found air fresheners and pesticides and traffic everywhere I went.

In my next book, which has a working title: A Memory of Light, I will extract from those four thousand leftover pages the story of that trip across America, in which I finally learned that I had been taught how to live with pleasure here already, by the animals in Africa. I just had to live like an animal instead of an American. So I lived the way the chimpanzees had in Africa, eating fruit and vegetables off the vine in the garden, swimming in mountain lakes with my dogs, watching bats at night. From Native Americans, Shakers, and all the melting pot populations of America, I had learned how to clean my house without chemicals, using baking soda and vinegar and flower oils, and how to make my toiletries from olive oil and salt and lavender. A Memory of Light will be a memoir of the six years of travel across America, living in youth hostels, and a guide to living like animals, with pure pleasure.