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Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.

Neville asks these questions in the second section, while he is at school. Neville is distancing himself from the natural world and turning toward his own private domain. The problem Neville has with nature is similar to what Louis sees in the city—it is full of disorder and emptiness. Neville longs for both human warmth and for an ideal state of perfection. These two desires are contradictory, of course, but at this point in the novel, Percival is still alive and Neville has yet to learn of the incompatibility of perfection and temporal existence. Another problem Neville sees with nature is simply that it is too big. Neville wants beauty, including harmony, grace, and proportion, rather than sublimity, which is awe-inspiring, forceful, and huge. The perfection Neville seeks is by definition to be found on a smaller, more intimate scale. In Neville’s desire for form and organization, we can see the beginnings of his future life of books and seclusion with a chosen lover, as well as his fondness for classical poets and orderliness.

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