Going forth and returning home

 

“I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time. Some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way – making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.” Philip Larkin (The Paris Review, 1982).

When I close my eyes, I smell the same smells that accompanied all my earliest memories of September that tell me that the autumn has really arrived. The air smells of wine, hay, dry leaves, drooping nettles and dusty smell of golden wheat. The sun starts to lose its high aspirations and it sets very low beyond the reeds and the grasses. The withering countryside turns into russet and gold in the afterglow.

Thousands of starlings flocking home resemble a bright necklace being tossed into the sky. The rooks are pecking at the autumn fields for stray wheat. Cattle are grazing in the pastures. The leaves on the ground in the woodland rustle like crinolines.

On a sunny day, I took my last chance of wearing a straw-hat before I packed it away for the winter when I went for my woodland walk. A lot of the fallen leaves are already scattered on the ground. 

I have seen the broad golden fields under a smiling sky for a thousand times but I shall never get bored of them. It is the landscape I shall look back on with a degree of romantic affection if ever I become an exile.

 All my new autumn decorations and quilts are out on display. 

 I picked the last summer flowers and lavender from the garden.

Pumpkin tea cake is perfect for autumn!

While I was having my tea and pumpkin cake, I listened to the late Nanci Griffith's beautiful album called The Dust Bowl Symphony (recorded live with The London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in London in 1999). The strings-laden orchestra makes Nanci's delicate folk ballads more sumptuous and romantic. Nanci was a poet and a wonderful singer and lyricist. She will be sadly missed.  

There's a pale sky in the east, all the stars are in the west

Oh, here's to all the dreamers, may our open hearts find rest

The wing and the wheel are gonna carry us along

And we'll have memories for company, long after the songs are gone. ~ Nanci Griffith ~

Philo came and joined me at my listening party.

It is late September. There is an indefinable magic in the air. Everything is calm outside. The birdsongs are quieter and the oystercatchers develop certain aloofness in their behaviour. People start to close their shutters and curtains early in the evening as if they were preparing for a stage in a theatre. There is stillness in the stubble fields. 

The autumn is a season of melodrama and reflection. The passing of time, like the harvest moon over the silent fields, is more noticeable in this time of the year than any other.   

Keats famously said that the autumn is a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Alas, this autumn we are having the opposite of fruitfulness. In fact, we are suffering from alarming shortages – from food and labour shortages to a petrol shortage. The lack of lorry drivers has led not only to some items missing from the supermarkets but also to halt fuel deliveries to dozens of garages.  

In my weekly grocery shopping, I noticed that a lot of shelves at the shop are empty. I haven’t been able to find certain vegetables such as cress, cucumber, and lettuce for salad. In times of crisis, I tend to be a glass-half-empty person. I should be more like Gordon who is a glass-half-full person. So I am grateful for the land that remains to be generous for its natural food supply.

Delicious home grown tomatoes from the neighbour's greenhouse. Gordon made it into the Italian tomatoes sauce.  

When it comes to travelling, my heart and mind are always in a state of anxiety. I’m not writing this as a bid for sympathy. But I have to acknowledge this state of mind in my journal to provide the opportunity for reflection and to give me the added vantage point of a perspective to distinguish what is rational fear and what is irrational fear. And where it comes from I ask to myself many times. 

The best person to give me an explanation is a poet, Cecil Day Lewis (1904-1972) in his poem ‘The Departure in the Dark’:

“Nothing so sharply reminds a man he is mortal/As leaving a place…”

Since our holiday in the Lake District is drawing near, I try not to rely on Gordon’s car for running errands so that there will be enough petrol when we go to England. I have been using the public bus service in the early hours of the morning. 

The bus tends to be very quiet in the morning. I sit back and sigh with relief every time I get my favourite window seat on the bus. Ah, those golden fields. That golden dawn! What a solace! What a calming influence on one’s eyes. Before arriving to my destination, I can be reassured in the knowledge that now there is no crowd, no traffic, no news, no internet and no demand. The countryside all around is there to be enjoyed for itself alone.

Recently, I have been re-reading Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, The Last September (1929). What a visual writer she was! This is nowhere more apparent than in this famous novel set in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence. It describes the story of a young woman’s emotional awakening in the fading world of Anglo-Ireland. There is something elegiac about Bowen’s vision of autumn with an emphasis on decay and a foreboding sense of ending. 

The story is also about the journey of self-discovery in the world of suppressed emotion and concealment – imposed by social conventions. There is an affinity between Bowen’s interest in an in-between stage, the turning point in life when childhood comes to an end, and Proust (indeed, the epigraph of this novel is a quote from Proust).

“The shorn uplands seemed to float on the distance, which extended dazzling to tiny blue glassy hills. There was no end to the afternoon, whose light went on ripening now they had scythed the corn […] Only screens of trees intersected and knolls made islands in the vast fields. The mansion and the home farm had sunk forever below them in the expanse of woods, so that hardly a ripple showed where the girls dwelled.” The Last September, Elizabeth Bowen 

“Behind them, rooks that had risen and circled, sun striking blue from their blue black wings, plane one by one to the earth and peck again. [...] In the inevitable silence rooks on the return from the fields could be heard streaming over the house; their sounds filled the sky and even the room, and it appeared so useless to ring the bell that Henrietta stayed quivering by Mamma’s chair.” The Last September, Elizabeth Bowen

Oh, to be in England!

I have been busy making a list of which music, films and books to take for the holiday. I always tend to take more books than I can read during my holiday. They are my passports to Arcady. I do not want to be deprived of books in case I am stranded in the middle of English countryside without an easy access to the library. 

John Masefield's Grace Before Ploughing is one of my favourites. It's meaningful and deeply felt autobiographical writing.   

I admire Tim Dee's nature writing. Every book he has written illustrates his mastery of the genre. I think that nature writing requires injection of poetry and Tim Dee's writing is lyrical in style to the verge of poetry. 

Out of all the books by Lawrence, I decided to take his collection of short stories selected by his recent biographer, Frances Wilson. This collection contains two of my favourtie short stories by Lawrence:  The Man Who Loved The Islands and The Prussian Soldier. Wilson said that the latter is one of the best short stories in the world. It is an extraordinary tale about jealousy. Even though it is not sexual, possessiveness can take many forms and sometimes, it can be utterly cruel.

I shall take a few audio books to listen while we are travelling. I decided that the audiobook about Proust and Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger should propel us forward to south of the border with or without the petrol!

Chekhov once said: “Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress”. I feel the same about Scotland and England. I have a romantic love for England and I miss seeing its green hills, mountains and lakes which breathe an air of timelessness. I can throw down the luggage and I can forget about the present convulsion of the world when I get there. I can rest while listening to the sound of the mountains and the streams from the cottage’s windows. It will be a little adventure. 

 

Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl (New York Review Books Classics) by Uwe Johnson (English translation from German by Damion Searls). I love the novels written in a journal format. This is Uwe Johnson’s masterpiece. Although it is not a short book to read during the holiday, the journal style makes it easy to read one entry a day. Do you realise how beautiful this English translation by Damion Searls? If you browse the first page and read the first paragraph, you will see what I mean. Damion Searls won the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of this novel.  

Proust and Ruskin are my ongoing projects. 

A book I keep on my bedside table to read each night before going to sleep. Victor Gollancz was strict with his readers telling them not to skip the order of entries in the way he arranged them. But he definitely knew its benefits and this has to be one of my desert island books. It addresses to human body, soul and mind as well as the spiritual and mental part of humanity. 

I think it is always a good idea to take a book about the place one is visiting.

I wonder if people still read Jean Stafford's novels these days. The new paperback edition of her novels have been published recently. So, it must be a sign that people still do read her books. I find her voice and writing absolutely compelling. Anita Brookner in her Introduction called Stafford's 1944 novel, Boston Adventure as "the work of a particularly mature and patrician novelist". Brookner compared Stafford's style to both Proust and Henry James. 

I love Ozu's films. I will never get tired of his films. On a rainy day, it will be ideal to watch one of his films. Ozu loved to explore the lives of melancholy and introspective characters and the limitations of relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives and lovers. 

A few classical CDs to listen in the evenings during the holiday.

June Christy's Gone for the Day is a personal favourite of mine. It's such a dreamy album. Pete Rugolo's musical arrangements are so refined and they bring out the best in June's voice and her sensitive interpretation. It puts me in the holiday spirit!   

In spite of my fear of travelling in an uncertain time of petrol shortages and Covid, I still think that it is worth going back to my beloved England to listen to the echoes of the lakes once more, to watch the sunrise and to remember the clouds and the mists rising up from the valley and the lakes. 

It would be a marvellous refuge. It will prevent me from the danger of becoming a dull soul. And I shall come back to my Scotland, feeling refreshed and rejuvenated, with a grateful heart. When it’s time to leave home, I shall think of a line from Cecil Day Lewis’ poem, ‘Departure in the Dark’:

 

"the desire / Going forth meets the desire returning."

When it’s time to leave home, I shall think of a line from Cecil Day Lewis’ poem, ‘Departure in the Dark’: "the desire / Going forth meets the desire returning."