Time & Perspective Quote by John James Audubon

Audubon’s sentence reads like a pastoral mic drop: a life compressed into four verbs, then sealed off from the adult world with a double-lock denial of worry. “Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music” aren’t just hobbies; they’re a self-curated curriculum. He’s sketching the origin story of a naturalist before “naturalist” was a stable job title in America. The list matters because it braids extraction (hunting, fishing) with attention (drawing) and feeling (music). Audubon’s genius, and his moral ambiguity, sit right there: he learned animals by killing them, then resurrecting them on paper with obsessive tenderness.

The line “Cares I knew not, and cared naught about them” performs innocence as a rhetorical strategy. It’s not only nostalgia; it’s permission. By claiming a childhood free of “cares,” he frames his later single-minded pursuit as destiny rather than choice, insulating himself from the practical objections that dogged him (money, stability, responsibility). The archaic cadence (“knew not,” “cared naught”) also elevates the memory into something mythic, a deliberately old-world music that flatters the image of the solitary genius.

Context sharpens the edge. Audubon was operating in a young nation hungry for grandeur and authority; his art-science hybrid offered both. This line helps sell the brand: a man formed by wildness, disciplined by craft, untouched by petty anxieties. The subtext is that worry is for people who aren’t paying attention. For Audubon, attention is the virtue that justifies everything.