Mountain*7 - for the person with nothing better to do

When the air is thick and the sky overcast, we need not walk so far. We give our attention to nearer objects, being less distracted from them. I take occasion to explore some near wood which my walks commonly overshoot.

What a difference it makes between two ravines in other respects exactly similar that in the one there is a stream which drains it, while the other is dry!

I see nowadays in various places the scattered feathers of robins, etc., where some hawk or beast of prey has torn them to pieces.

I step over the slip-noose which some woodling has just set. How long since men set snares for partridges and rabbits?

Ah, my friends, I know you better than you think, and love you better, too. The day after never, we will have an explanation.

Henry David Thoreau

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Man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms)... Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misinformed, an infinite realm of non-truths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.

Milan Kundera, The Curtain

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On re-reading this on a recent trip over to Ypres and Passchendale, aside from the awe at the naked descriptions of horror and carnage, what I was most astounded by was Remarque's, at times, near-schizophrenic appreciation of nature. It's clear that in his hyper-sensitive state Remarque/Bäumer was able to observe minute changes in the world around him - in both tone and atmosphere - as if the usual aspects of time and space had come unmoored. The passage below is from the section of the book in which Bäumer is guarding Russian prisoners a few miles behind the front line.

Most beautiful are the woods with the line of birch trees. Their colour changes with every minute. Now the stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken, hangs the pastel green of the leaves; the next moment all changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes over the sun. And this shadow moves like a ghost through the dim trunks and rides far out over the moor to the sky - then the birches stand out again like gay banners on white poles, with their red and gold patches of autumn-tinted leaves.

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In my cabin I learnt the sheer luxury of day dreaming. It has been my making and my undoing too. How many days, weeks, months have I lost to it? But perhaps it isn't lost time at all, but the most valuable thing I could have done.

Roger Deakin, Notebooks

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Spring is a bad time for work; and why? Because we are feeling too much. Nobody but a beginner imagines that he who creates must feel

Thomas Mann - 'Tonio Kroger'

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A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened

Albert Camus

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