Flight and Pursuit

On my way to bed the other night I was brushing my teeth in the cold bathroom, when a thought occurred to me, which I’ll tell you in due course. The bathroom is cold because it is winter here: not a pretty blanket of snow but a frost that bites, the sort of frost that engenders the instinct to social care, otherwise the frail and elderly poor could easily die of cold even with a roof over their heads. We could afford to heat the house all the time in all rooms, simply by adjusting the thermostats, but a natural austerity prevents; or perhaps it is the instinct not to isolate ourselves from Nature; not to live in a bubble of artificiality any more than is needed for survival and modest comfort.

But that’s not the particular thought which occurred to me then. It’s true I was longing for Summer, but that is jumping a step, because Spring comes first, and who would want to miss that? I found myself in flight from Winter, as if it were an affliction. Last weekend we went to my daughter’s family and they took us to an open-sided barn in the Cotswolds for a drama performance, just after nightfall in the late afternoon. My son-in-law had lent me some long-johns (underpants which extend to the ankles) and an extra sweater. The seating was bales of straw and the stage was a small caravan parked against the open side of the barn; adjacent was an open corner covered with an awning. In the play, the caravan represented an inn and the corner a stable. For it was a play of Christ’s nativity, a rustic-style comedy rendered in rhyming verse, featuring the innkeeper and his wife; the three kings; a commenting angel; Mary and Joseph. The baby Jesus was not represented, neither by baby actor or doll, and I don’t think the labour and delivery were depicted, but I was sitting at the back and may have missed something. Much could be said about the play, if I were determined to review it; but my main preoccupation was to survive the cold. The message I got from the play, therefore, was the bitter one of “no room at the inn”; which results in a cruel exposure to the elements.

I still have not told you the thought which came as I was brushing my teeth. It arrived newborn yet fully-formed, in these words: “The senses are merely reminders”: words which put my world into disarray. For in this blog I have felt I was celebrating the senses for their own sake, glorying in the human animal through a series of shared ramblings and wayfarings. It’s true I’ve many times noted that sights and smells have triggered reminders, possibly pointing to something before this life. It’s that “merely” that I find a little troubling. When you think about it, the feeling of hunger or the smell of food are reminders to eat.

Was this thought—which I took to be a kind of angelic message, for it wasn’t the result of any prior reasoning on my part—also about “spirit?” I’m instinctively wary of that stuff, not to describe or define in a way that suggests belief. But these lines spring into my head:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
….
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
….
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy …

(Wordsworth, extracts from Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

I must stop fleeing from Earth, even though its breath be unkind.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember’d not.

(Shakespeare, As You Like It)

So yesterday I decided to stop cowering indoors but go wayfaring and defy the frost. I donned some long-johns and an extra sweater and went forth on my quest. Setting out from the church with the Golden Ball, I walked along the forested ridge, hearing only the crunch of my footsteps, and the call of various large birds: the raucous cawing of rooks, the rusty percussion of pheasants and the gentle precise whistling of red kites, which sounded like a shepherd’s signalling to his dog when engaged in herding sheep. My goal was a spot where in 2007 I had taken a photo of another ridge across the valley: Bledlow Ridge. I tried to frame the same panorama, at 9am on December 31st. You can compare the two, and see that few features have changed in 18 months, save what Winter has done. But they show why I long for Spring.