Seminal
Written Words
Not long ago, actually
on looking back amazingly nearly five years ago, I did a couple of pieces
entitled Echo of a Song I & II. The
title “a short phrase that I
find both evocative and suggestive of things past, returning musical memories
or seminal musical moments, which was to be original title of the above blog
posts.”
Well, now it’s the turn
of writing and I’ve returned to the notion of “seminal,” writing that is for me
at least, some of the following; formative,
groundbreaking,
pioneering,
original,
creative,
innovative.
I’m also going to
return to my love of quotes, as it is often the case and indeed very true of
the pieces of writing discussed below, that not only do I wish I’d said or
written them but, also feel they say just what I’m trying to communicate, and
probably far better that I could ever achieve.
Ralph Waldo-Emerson, an
American essayist, lecturer and poet from the 19th century, who
keeps cropping up in my reading with profound quotes and what might now be
regarded as remarkable “sound bites(!),” wrote the following, to his
contemporary Sam Ward, an American poet, author and gourmet: “It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime
to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power
to intoxicate us and none other, and having exhausted that cup of enchantment
we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise
again.” And then in the words of possibly Frank Zappa, composer and singer, or
Thomas Jefferson, American Founding Father:
“So many books, so little time.”
But thankfully, then French writer Gustave Flaubert comes to our rescue
by telling us to “Read in order to live.”
For the purposes of
this “blog post”, a term that I think is increasingly replacing the more
old-fashioned “essay”, I’m initially going to choose just three such seminal
pieces; a chapter of a book, a whole book and a magazine article, that each for
different, although maybe loosely linked reasons, have caused the cup of
enchantment to intoxicate me and made me travel (interestingly this is I
suppose the loose link mentioned above, together with “our wonderful world”
which we encounter either in person or through the written word) to Paradise,
as well as leading to a fair amount of “groping” in libraries, bookshops,
charity shops, book fairs and anywhere else that the written word might be
found. These are they, together with some of the critical acclaim they have
received:
1.
The Art of Travel (Chapter 2 On Travelling Places), Alain de Botton
Sunday
Times: “Lucid, fluid, uplifting ......
it can enrich and improve your life.”
Jan Morris,
Welsh historian, author and travel writer: “Delightful, profound
entertaining. I doubt if de Botton has
written a dull sentence in his life.”
2. The Shining Levels, John Wyatt
Daily
Mirror: “A delight for those who love
nature.”
Sunday
Times: “The story of a man who went back
to nature; funny, instructive and a rare treat”
3. Spiritual journeys, Roger Thomas
An article for
SAGA Magazine, yes I know!! But, it is
an organisation for the over fifties, and although many years ago when only mid
thirties I was horrified to receive an invitation to subscribe, I do now tick
the box for the correct age group!! And,
I will say, don’t knock the magazine until you’ve read it, although aimed at
the over fifties there are some great articles as you will hear below!
Hopefully, these three
examples will give you just a flavour of what I grope for, whenever I see books
for sale or indeed to borrow, and just maybe, some of you will have suggestions
of what I might intoxicate myself with in the future and once again visit
Paradise! So to take them in order:
The
Art of Travel, Alain de Botton:
Long have I been
fascinated by places, particularly at night, and as a recent blog post told you
I’ve discovered that I’m a noctambulist (one
who is wide awake and chooses the hours of darkness to wander in wonder,
aimlessly or with a deep sense of purpose, indeed therapy, marvelling at the
scenery as well as managing to if not quite to put the world to rights, at the
very least sort out that niggling problem), although this wandering, at
least in my case, doesn’t just involve walking.
I’m fascinated by places, as I said particularly at night, like motorway
services, stations and airports, with all the fascinating stories that might
come from them – Deirdre and the Expresso Machine, Tales from the Carriage, Flight
into the Unknown – I’m sure you get the idea and somehow at night for me the
imagination can speed up, fly away or as my wife might say become totally
derailed, or was it deranged she said!
It might not surprise those of you who know me well that I’m writing
this on the morning side of midnight!
Hence, my initial
interest then in a book called The Art of Travel, which does talk about what it
says in the title, as well as, in parts discussing the “benefits” of armchair
travel – wonderful sights and sounds from the comfort of your own armchair, but
for me I think that maybe the smells and the true feel of the place are hard to
put into words, so a real visit is necessary!
It’s a fabulous book,
but for me it’s Chapter 2, that really does it for me because it visits “1. The
service station”, “3. The airport”, “4. The plane” and “The train”. Quite blissful, and as I said above about the
quotes, not only do I wish I’d written these examples below, but also feel they
communicate what I think, in a manner far better than I could write!!:
1.
“In its forecourt hangs a giant laminated flag that advertises to motorist and
to the sheep in an adjacent field a photograph of a fried egg, two sausages and
a peninsular of baked beans.” and that’s before
you’ve even got out of the car!
“There
were few other customers in the service station. A woman was idly rotating a teabag in a
cup. A man and two young girls were
eating hamburgers. A bearded elderly man
was doing a crossword. No one was
talking. There was an air of refection, and
sadness too – only heightened by the sound of piped upbeat music and the enamel
smile of a woman about to bite into a bacon sandwich in a photograph above the
counter.” each no doubt with their own story to tell.
3. "Seen from the car park beside O9L / 27R, as
the north runway is known to pilots, the 747 appears at first as a small
brilliant white light, a star dropping towards earth. It has been in the air for twelve hours. It took off from Singapore at dawn.”
“Nowhere
is the appeal of the airport more concentrated than in the television screens
which hang in rows from the terminal ceilings announcing the departure and
arrival of flights and whose absence of aesthetic self-consciousness, whose
workmanlike casing and pedestrian typefaces, do nothing to disguise their emotional charge or imaginative
allure.” Wow!
4. “Few seconds in life are more releasing than
those in which a plane ascends into the sky.
Looking out of the window from inside a machine standing stationary at
the beginning of a runway, we face a vista of familiar proportions; a road, oil
cylinders, grass and hotels with copper-tinted windows; the earth as we have
always known it, where we make slow progress, even with the help of a car,
where calf muscles and engines strain to reach the summit of hills, where, half
a mile ahead or less, there is almost always a line of trees or buildings to
restrict our view. Then, suddenly,
accompanied by the controlled rage of the engine (with only a slight tremor
from glasses in the galley), we rise fluently into the atmosphere and an
immense horizon opens up across which we can wander without impediment. A
journey which on earth would have taken an afternoon can be accomplished with
an infinitesimal movement of the eye, we can cross Berkshire, visit Maidenhead,
skirt over Bracknell and survey the M4.”
and there’s lots more!
Just a flavour of a
great chapter, within a fascinating book, want more then go grope in the
bookshop!
Shining
Levels, John Wyatt:
I was thoroughly
enchanted when I read this delightful book about a man who spent a period of
his life living very simply in a log cabin deep in a wood, and every time I see
a deer (he befriended a couple who regularly grazed outside the cabin), or wake
up with the dappled sunlight shining through soft green leaves I think of John
Wyatt’s book.
As a teacher, pupils
often ask you if you have a favourite; be it football team, animal,
colour, food,
pop group, song, author, place or indeed book and I often found such questions
to be a difficult to answer, with perhaps some exceptions, your allegiance to a
particular football team rarely fluctuates, however badly they might be doing,
but with many of the others it’s a mood or circumstance thing. I love the colour red, but wouldn’t paint the
front of my house that colour.
Similarly, I love to eat pan-fried salmon with new potatoes and green
beans, but sometimes it just doesn’t hit the spot a fine confit of duck, chips
and green beans does.
And, in many ways, it’s
the same with books. As a child I loved
Arthur Ransomes’ Swallows and Amazons books and still look back on them fondly
and at different times in my life I have enjoyed different genres, often
telling the children that I have a “favourite of the moment” or “different
favourites for different moods”, this being particularly pertinent for
different songs. Sometimes I’m in the
mood for rock and roll, at other times I like nothing more than a quiet tuneful
ballad. But, that said I would often say
that my all time favourite book was a book called Shining Levels, as although
for John it was reality, for the rest of us it’s pure escapism:
“
... one morning I awoke to find two pairs of startled eyes staring in at me
from the
sunny clearing. It was a roe
buck and doe, alerted by my movements in the gloom of my tree cave. We stared at each other for quite a while
until the two deer, satisfied with no further movement on my part, browsed
their way out of the clearing.
Every
morning there was a surprise awakening.
Looking out into the bright green light, from the gloom of my shelter,
was like looking from the black everlasting pit into paradise. Drops of dew catching the light at the tips
of hanging grass-thatch seemed alive, each with its own jewel-fire. This one brilliant mauve. This one red, or orange or bright dazzling
green. Each one in isolation seemed to
have vital cosmic significance as it hung there in the silence. Peering through the perpetual night of my
room, the dew drops were bright stars in a galaxy stretching into a hazy green
infinity. And time stopped.”
But it wasn’t all so
idyllic, as the following passage shows, when part of the forest caught fire!
“I
can promise you that there is no harder job than beating back a fire. It is pure
hell. Your lungs are crying out for air and being
insulted by smarting smoke. Your heart
is banging like a sledgehammer, and your arms flaying up and down like a
machine. You are tormented by the
constant anxiety about keeping up with the others, and you curse the flames
that refuse to go out. They spit and
snarl and dash at you, and you curse back heartily and steadily, remembering
all the naval expletives that you thought had been lost on demobilisation
day. The fire strikes back at you with
blows of choking heat. As you think you
are winning, and morale flickers up one notch, you glimpse, through the corner
of your streaming eye, that somehow the inferno has crept behind you.” and
it is not over yet!
But I should also say
that, at the time, I had to admit that I couldn’t always remember the name of
the author.
Then a strange thing
happened! No, not the beginning of a
book, trying to bring readers in, but one of life’s huge coincidences. I joined an national organisation for
voluntary wardens in the countryside, as at the time I was a Voluntary Cotswold
Warden, and at one of our annual conferences during the evening meal I found
myself sitting next to the President of the organisation and as the
conversation and the wine flowed, I had a quite illuminating light bulb moment,
when I suddenly realised I was sitting next to the author of my favourite
book. I subsequently got to know John
quite well and came to regard him as a good friend and spent several evenings
with a glass or two of fine malt whisky, and with John putting his storytelling
abilities to good use, before his untimely death, several years ago. I was also then able to say that I knew the
author of my favourite book, tell the story of our meeting and that made it
even more special.
Spiritual
journeys, Roger Thomas:
As I said above this is
an article from a Saga magazine, heralding “a
raft of books exploring Britain’s ancient byways” that come “hard on the heels of Griff Rhys Jones’s
‘Britain’s Lost Routes’ on BBC One”, and in little over two pages it weaves
a magical pathway.
Trying hard not to
simply reproduce the whole article, here are some of the best bits, starting
with the opening paragraph!:
“If
cars can speak to you – as those of a pedal-to-the-metal Clarksonian persuasion
maintain – then landscapes can surely shout, scream and deafen. No matter how articulate the world’s fastest,
most expensive car might be (it’s a Bugatti Veyron, if you ask), it stands no
chance against the leonine roar of a mountain – or, for that matter, the
sublime whisper of a softly spoken valley.”
“
......... on one of my first writing jobs.
I’d gone to Carreg Cennan Castle, an abandoned, stumpy-toothed ruin
perched on a cliff in the desolate Black Mountain region of the western Brecon
Beacons. No place before, or since, has
had such an unsettling – but not altogether unpleasant – effect on me. I can’t properly explain it, but a postscript
later in the article might shine a stronger light on the sledgehammer punch I
felt from this collection of ancient, weatherbeaten stones mouldering on a
bald, black hill in the middle of nowhere.”
“I
believe that the reach of landscape extends way beyond the stuff that fills the
confines of a map. It is animate and
articulate, a repository of folk memories, war and peace, life and death, fire
and rain, sorrow and joy. And you don’t
have to be a loopy mystic to tune in.”
“.........
the Burren, that moonscape of fractured limestone just south of Galway, an
otherworldly grey dome barren but for the rare plants that grow in its
fissures. The wind howled in from the
Atlantic and the sun blasted through the clouds like a biblical searchlight as
I came to the Poulnabrone dolmen, the skeletal framework of a Neolithic tomb
balanced on a limestone pavement. Those
were the elements of the scene. But the
sum of the parts – the synergy between rock, sun and man – was somehow
greater.”
“Take
it from me, the Dean [Forest of Dean] is one strange place, a high plateau on the road to nowhere, bypassed,
ignored, arcane and insular.
Ancient
woodlands, laden with memories of the forest as King Canute’s royal hunting
ground, begin incongruously at the back door of industrial terraces. Spirits even exist underground, as one of the
freeminers of the forest a tradition going back to the 13th century,
told me: ‘This [mine] is a living thing for me, with a language of its own. It’s always telling me something.”
The postscript to the
Carreg Cennen visit involves a vision of the place by an American who had never
been there, but told to the author when he was on a visit to California
some
years after his own experiences at the castle.
But this leads to the author of this article, Roger Thomas, to finish
thus:
“If
this sounds too hippie for your tastes, please again be reassured that I’m a
level-headed kind of guy. Lots of New
Age mumbo jumbo leaves me cold, wine is my drug of choice and I don’t believe
in fairies. But I do believe that when
you follow an old drovers’ road or pilgrims’ trail, those footprints that went
before you, although long gone, leave a legacy.
Their residue reveals a sense of attachment, or perhaps higher purpose,
solace and comprehension. It’s the same
when you come across a place that immediately speaks to you in a language you
can – yet can’t – understand.!”
And for me there have
been many of those, but that’s perhaps for another blog post “Seminal personal
places!”
***********************
Finally
and in conclusion, I simply hope you see what I mean?
P.S: Since starting this and
perhaps continuing with the loose themes of “travel” and “our wonderful world”
and also through the writings of Richard Mabey I have both discovered and
rediscovered a wealth of books that fall well and truly into the seminal. Type the names Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane
and indeed Richard Mabey, into your search engine and marvel at the pathways and
wonders that you can encounter, not only in their books, but also those that are
linked to their names, by theme, genre or more eclectic routes. And, if you enjoyed what you read in the
samples above, I’m sure you’ll find endless hours of fruitful wanderings from
these small seeds, if you grope in the right places!!
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