I have the odd idea, when I’m tramping streets or country paths, or riding on a bus, that this is when I feel most truly at home. What on earth can that mean?*
I’m threading my way through this housing estate on the hillside, the one I see from my study window. It has become a favourite walk, and as the hill is steep, I move like a sailing ship in a headwind, the Pastures, photographed from my house tacking from side to side through alleys, behind backyards, a myriad routes where only pedestrians can go. My goal is the sub-post office at the top, one of those endangered gathering-places with one or two counters for stamps, parcels, certain government business: all at the back of a shop which supplies a variety of handy things for the village community. People come mostly for the postal counter. Without it the shop would not survive.
I feel as if I’m the only one who sees something sublime in this close-packed housing estate. It reminds me of Santorini or Capri, that is, if it’s possible to be reminded of places you’ve never been,
and ignoring the climate and a million other things. If you drive through it you’ll see nothing but uniformity: parallel roads going up the slope diagonally, lined by identical buildings, offset like teeth on a saw. But if you take a pedestrian route you can zig-zag between the houses, and be constantly surprised by new vistas and perspectives: walls towering above, ravines below, steps, twists and turns, great views across the valley, insanitary corners heaped with broken things, shattered fences—or sometimes brand new ones. Despite obvious signs of investment here and there, the overall pattern is neglect: no pride of ownership, an ignorant disdain for good order. None of this touches me. I see only what might be; perhaps what was, when these places were first built, or what they could become when passed on to more eager and energetic hands.
I’m always astonished by the quietness of outdoors, when you can move clear of the traffic. I’m astonished that I can walk the earth, without let or hindrance. This is where I belong. If I’m actually at home, in the house, it’s all too easy to mislay this feeling of being embraced by the entire Earth. Instead it’s either absorption in some activity till I’ve done it too long, or “what ought I to do now?”
Outside, I may or may not have a destination and purpose, but it’s enough to be, conscious of being this singular creature, totally present.
I wonder if I’ve stumbled on a secret, a way to feel as a prisoner would feel, after being incarcerated half a lifetime, when released dazed and blinking under the open sky; or someone of clear
conscience and in good health enjoying his last hours of freedom before execution on some noble point of principle. I have no idea how anyone might feel under such circumstances. I simply guess they would seize the day, no matter what it holds. Something I can’t do indoors, for example here at this moment, smoothing a sentence or two.
If it makes sense to say that I have stumbled on a secret, I shall perhaps disappoint the reader, because I don’t have a formula. I only know that it took me a lifetime to find it. And even now, it’s
fragile, subject to vicissitude. It’s as if every other activity that I undertake, except walking the earth, being in this state of remembrance, is to forget it all again. I would it were not so, and that other ways would present themselves, so that I could be in this state of remembrance more often, wouldn’t be limited to these times out under the sky.
Oddly enough, for thirty years I did in principle have something else, I did try to take on a form of breath meditation, which in itself is supposed to be constant remembrance. It’s only now that I can look back and see clearly how much it fell short, didn’t connect. Surely that’s why I persisted so determinedly: because it wasn’t working. The less you get paid, the harder you have to work. But I count myself lucky for one reason at least, that I was one day able to see how lost I’d become, how I had sold , for eventually I saw how lost I had become. I sold my birthright for a mess of pottage. I gave away my most precious possession, this inner voice which guides me, for a spurious voice of a spurious guru. In hindsight I see that the breath meditation was unpleasant and burdensome, I don’t mean just when sitting with eyes closed and turning the senses inwards as prescribed, but in everyday life too. It was unnatural. It was like being on some constant analgesic. I find the very thought of it repugnant.
I pass a new house, completed not long ago, which looked very wrong to me until today: fake Victorian, somehow you could tell it is not solid, unlike my own little cottage, which is the genuine thing, or even the one which it adjoins. Yet today, when I saw the bicycle at the top of the steps, leaning against the iron railings, a proper bike with pannier bags, reminiscent of those you see in Holland, the house had acquired an elegance. It has become just right, properly proportioned and presented, like most buildings in Holland, with or without bikes parked outside.
Such is the power of this transformation, that I start to see everything else as just right too, well not everything. But certainly things are looking pretty good: people I pass, their dress and movements, present to my gaze like well-directed extras in a movie. A little artistic touch has been applied. By whom? I have wished to be an in life, that’s better than in literature. Shall I become a beholder, with beauty resident in my eye? For now it’s an occasional visitor. Then I need not publish, nor even write. Perhaps I shall do nothing but give thanks. The urge to give back persists.
Now there’s a seagull on the grass with three crows. The seagull flies off when it sees me. The crows stay. Then the seagull lands on a lamp-post where a small crow stands already, causing the crow to fly away. How do they view one another? With indifference, I imagine.
Traversing these back paths up and down the Pastures, I enter the world of its residents but I don’t see what they see. Surface appearance is merely a backdrop, a painted scene adorning the stage on which we strut. The screenplay exists in imagination: normally we only learn one part, and suppose this character we play is the star. Never mind. Whatever we imagine is real. The world is
made up of a vast collection of personal realities, with all their pain, delight and boredom. Blake saw angels in the trees. I can’t say anything so definite, only that if the people who lived here saw it as I do, they would cherish it, keep the fences mended, tend the gardens, keep paths and yards clear of litter and discarded furniture. Every corner would be a feast for the eyes. People would
come just to see it, just to wander here. As I do.
* I suddenly thought of Roquentin, in Sartre’s La Nausée: his experience was quite the opposite. I hadn’t read it for more than fifty years, in French then. At certain moments the outside world gave him a sense of alienation that made him sick with horror. I think he was on a bus when the seats seemed horribly swollen, like beached whales breathing their last. Then he was in a park, staring at the gnarled bark of an old tree, getting freaked out by it. I on the other hand get nourished by mother earth in almost all her aspects.
a wayfarer’s notes 