Education
I write haiku to suit myself: they come from the relationship I imagine I have with the world out there in the here & now. They reconstruct something between me & it – I’m never quite sure what that might be. One can so easily fall into the trap of producing standard formula haiku – […]
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men – each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature – are shot down wholesale. If, however, we were not something more than unique human beings and each man jack of us […]
Anonymous article from Socialist Worker 18th September 2022 Politicians and the media drove the mourning for the queen. And those that dared to protest against the monarchy faced arrest. But nobody actually drove people on to the streets to join the long queues to view the queen’s coffin. And nobody lost their job if they […]
I have often tried to recall how I spent my days before the advent of the damned computer. It did seem to be something of a minor miracle when I acquired a primitive word processor (Amstrad 8256) around 1994. Working on it provided me with a valuable systemic relationship after thoroughly digesting which my fountain […]
In One Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse bewails the ‘lost dimensions’ – dimensions of existence that, in the crass technological dash for conformity, have faded in human life . Lost dimensions exist in areas of the spirit that seem to have no place in the one-dimensional world where opposition to prevailing ways of seeing things […]
The heart has a yearning for the unknown, a longing to penetrate the deep shadow and the winding glade, where, as it seems, no human foot has been. The Hills and the Vale (Marlborough Forest) Though it started other-than-consciously when I first dreamed into Lenbach’s Shepherd Boy at the age of 10, it’s no exaggeration […]
In his introduction to the OUP After London (1980) John Fowles wrote ‘…Some of his more starry-eyed later worshippers have forgotten that he enjoyed hunting and killing for much of his life…’ I once had a neighbour who owned a cat and a dog both of whom he obtained from a rescue centre; they were […]
In The Pageant of Summer (the first essay in The Life of the Fields (1884)) Jefferies wrote:- My heart is fixed firm and stable in the belief that ultimately the sunshine and the summer, the flowers and the azure sky, shall become, as it were, interwoven into man’s existence. He shall take from all their […]
In Restless Human Hearts (1875), after their trial marriage and disappointing continental trip, Neville and Georgiana are reflecting separately on the concern they feel about their future: Georgie wants the ‘transports of love’ she and Neville had at the beginning of their relationship, while Neville requires something else. “I think,” said Neville, speaking in a […]
In depicting character Jefferies uses what TSEliot was later to describe as an ‘Objective Correlative’. The early novels deserve re-assessment. Pre-amble In Richard Jefferies: his life and his ideals (1905), writing about the novels, HSSalt (1851-1939 campaigner for social reform, animal rights, vegetarian, socialist, and pacifist, literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist) reflects that […]
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