Walking the world as the seasons turn
I'm reading about hiking in Scotland and artists' last works while time marches on, as it tends to do.
Hi! I’m Hannah James, journalist, writer and editor, and this is where I read and recommend (mostly) nature books. Thanks for reading!
Did you notice it? It happened on a Saturday afternoon a week or so ago - I felt the air change. Autumn arrived and although I was sick of 30-degree days and humidity so thick you could swim in it, this change of season always brings a little sadness with it.
It’s not autumn, of course. I’ve written before about how bizarre it is that colonists imported European seasons to Australia, among many other even less useful artifacts. It’s technically still Burran, the hot, dry season here in D’harawal Country, but definitely already shading into Marrai-gang, or the wet-becoming-cool season.
The seasons may be different in the southern hemisphere, but the touch of melancholy an English autumn always used to occasion in me remains. The calendar (also imported, of course) plays a different role here, though - instead of the gloom prompted by the reminder that yet another year is racing to its end, I’m taken aback that we’re already a quarter of the way through this still-new year. Wait, wait! Hasn’t it all only just begun?
Yes, OK, I suppose the turning of the seasons makes me feel old.
Neil Ansell feels old, too. He is growing deafer and deafer. Sometimes he can’t breathe very well. His chest hurts and he carries medication to counter the occasional savage pain that attacks in the night. But he steps out one, two, five times in one year, as he recounts in The Last Wilderness: A Journey into Silence, to explore the Rough Bounds in the Scottish Highlands without map or compass, without much of a plan, and entirely alone.
An accomplished outdoorsman who has lived a rich, deep life filled with exploring the natural world, he charts not only the process of getting to know this particular part of the world, and not only the way in which his increasing deafness is robbing him of its intricate web of sounds, but also the memories his walks bring to light of his previous travels.
He’s an enchanting travel companion: funny and sociable when called upon to be so; generous in sharing his knowledge (always with the lightest of touches); skilled at sketching both landscapes and wildlife; and capable of dips into profundity.
Ansell’s discursive, diaristic book is the best kind of nature writing; a book that delights, explains and inspires you to set off on your own explorations.
More autumnal colours from another book I just finished: Christopher Neve’s Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague. Actually, here we’re more in winter. A painter and writer (I wrote about his book Unquiet Landscape here), he was 78 in 2020, when he wrote this book. Shut away against the plague, alone in the farmhouse in which he grew up, Neve contemplates the final paintings of 18 artists and explores what they tell us about how each thought about art and about life as they approached its end. With extraordinary vividness, he drops us into each artist’s milieu:
“It is a baleful business going up the steep street in the heat in Le Cannet on the Côte d’Azur to call on Bonnard in 1946, I can tell you.”
“You saw her [Gwen John] once, or perhaps several times, but did not know that it was her… You could have seen her crossing the street, perhaps on her way to buy coley for the cats… You arranged to meet but must have somehow mistaken the time or place. Either she was not there or you were not there, or perhaps it was the wrong year. It was in the church at Meudon, about the winter of 1919 or ’20, that you saw her. Small cloche hat. Brown coat… She was kneeling behind two nuns, a girl and an older woman, partly drawing them and partly praying.”
“With difficulty, workmen have unhooked the chandeliers in a large room on the ground floor facing across the palace square in the Alcázar, to make it into a workshop for Velázquez. It is 1656.”
“Toledo. Under that torn sky. The green of the Tajo below, and the jagged grey line of the city wall like a brushstroke on the escarpment. If, going from church to monastery to his [El Greco’s] house, you look for his last paintings, you will notice the following: that he paints with alarming speed, that he paints always on a warm brown ground, and that he deliberately damages faces towards the end of a painting, perhaps out of exuberance.”
Neve’s style is impressionistic, loose, free: after painting in these backgrounds with quick, deft strokes, he ranges widely through biography and art history, but always returns, as old people do, to the inside of his artist’s head. You’re with Goya and Roualt in their respective bedrooms as they die, hearing their very last thoughts and memories; you’re in the room with Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin as the two old painters have their final conversation, together in place and time (Poussin’s house in Rome; the late 17th century) but forever worlds apart in their approach to art; you’re watching the aspen leaves quiver in Civry-sur-Serein with Chaïm Soutine, feeling his frenzy of creation and restless dissatisfaction with the result, and catching his arm as he begins to destroy his paintings.
Neve describes late style as:
“Part death, part memory, part intuition. A way of working that transcends technique and sets no store by the ability to finish. A willingness to take risks, to chance the arm. The urgent need to leave behind terms of reference and get to the heart of the matter without breaking off to explain.”
There could be no better description of his own approach to this book. It’s a headlong dash directly into these artists’ brains and hearts and souls; it’s madcap, daring, bold beyond belief; but founded on a lifetime’s intimate knowledge of their work. It’s exhilarating - he just doesn’t care what anyone thinks of this book, he is doing this only and precisely for himself, to get at those ideas, that heart of the matter, before it’s too late - but also virtuosic. Locked down in his rural home, he had no access to these paintings, but wrote from memory and love.
It’s the rural home that qualifies this as nature writing, too. Neve’s essays are punctuated by brief sketches of what was happening at each stage of the pandemic, counterpointed by dazzlingly beautiful forays out the back door and into his garden as that plague year progressed.
“Now the delicate abundance of garden and landscape began its reckless second stanza, as though snowdrops and cowslips were no longer enough. Orchard grass was full of dog violets, speedwell, bugle. Apple blossom, brightly lit against deep shadow, fresh pink, white, carmine… The avenue of crabapple trees was in blossom, the chestnuts decorated loftily with green-white candles, the row of oaks round-shouldered with fresh foliage… True geraniums, a fine ecclesiastical purple. Erigeron. Lily of the valley. Surrounded by death, the beehives were busy… At night a colossal canopy of clear constellations was bright in pure air. The slender sickle of the new moon and its neighbour Venus were of astounding brilliance and very near. May God receive my soul.”
It’s late, though. It’s getting late, and suddenly we’re in autumn, and then winter, and in a final dizzying rush we’re in Neve’s garden in a fresh snowfall, and looking at a dead thrush that is somehow also Neve himself.
“I was dead, but the pictures would remain.”
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Great to discover you , and so close! I am on Gadigal and Wangal land. Very much relate to your experience of seasons dysphoria from reading so many Northern nature writers while immersed in very different seasons and markers here. Easters with diminishing light and crisp mornings and still warm ocean currents. To me this is when the year deepens, and I get to read, write and reflect more. The last Wilderness is on my list now, Thnak you!
Love this one, Hannah. Actually makes me feel better about getter older…