A PERSONAL JOURNEY My early inner life was a gift to myself alone – always on my own. Father off in India somehow defending the freedom of UK, as they say about foreign escapades nowadays; mother consumed by worry for my sister who was starting the awful disease from which she eventually died in 2005. […]
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 […]
“We talk too much,” he said with unwonted seriousness. “Clever talk is of no value whatsoever. One merely gets further and further away from oneself and that is a crime. One should be able to crawl right into oneself like a tortoise.” Hermann Hesse: Demian On the 19th August 2022 I followed the local doctor’s […]
It’s well worth taking some time to… ponder the idea that we consist not just of one single ‘I’ but of a large number of ‘I’s that constantly compete for attention. For example, the reader may well now be in Reading-these-words-I but also feeling the urge to get into Wondering-what-the-first sentence-means-for-them-I while being dominated by […]
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 […]
When my father died in 1971, I read The Story of My Heart for solace; I found it abundantly in its pages: ‘It is useless to fill the heart with bubbles. A loved one gone is gone…’ And I have continued to think of him since then at least once a day, using his spirit […]
On 6th February 1989 I did a little chinwag in Swindon about the only four Jefferies novels I had access to then. I’ve just re-read what I said about The Dewy Morn and it still seems to make reasonable sense! There are little tweaks I’d make now. Here’s the original chinwag with a few 2022 […]
Pre-amble I’ve not long finished reading Restless Human Hearts for the first time. Having only recently re-joined the Richard Jefferies Society after many years of wandering around in other things (I remember Cyril Wright very well…) it was exciting to find that the books which had only been names to me for sixty years had […]
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 […]
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