Tree trunks
I’ve been reading a book recently that I picked up after hearing of it on the Talking Politics podcast. It’s interesting, but I’ve also found it a little intimidating because it’s somewhere north of 700 pages long. What’s more, looking at my to-read shelf, I can see at least 4 other brick-sized books lying unread. I vaguely recall Mary Beard writing something about a preference for the pivotal intervention by journal article over the last word book, but I don’t think I really knew what she meant at the time. Sitting here, though, I wonder who manages to read these things in full? Maybe it’s just me and my inadequate reading.
It made me think of David Foster Wallace – he commented about some efforts to analyse Infinite Jest, saying something like they’d identified 1½ out of the 4 main themes he was exploring. I suppose he didn’t feel it was his place to tell people how to read his book, or what to make of it, but it always struck me as some sort of tragedy that he died leaving some of the messages he was trying to convey unresolved. (I have my own ideas about the book and the internet detective work being done on it, but that’s something for another day.)
Written History
We’ve got a few big oak trees in the field. There is a method for turning the girth of the tree into a rough age, but the theory is more straightforward than the practice because of big knots in the trunk. Still, the biggest one must be 2 or even 3 hundred years old. It’s an attractive tree, standing alone in the field, but it’s hard to connect it with details of the past – perhaps it’s easier when it’s a tree in a location tied to some of them, I was in the next door neighbours’ field the other day. Their biggest trees are in a small stand at the bottom, by a stream and there’s a real sense of atmosphere stood amongst them that I don’t really get from my own tree.
We’ve been planting quite a lot of trees in the last couple of years – a row that should turn into a beech/hazel hedge, some apple trees & other fruit, and then a couple of willows in a boggy patch. And a couple of horse chestnuts that a horse ate a chunk of (they had some of the apples, too). But there’s something a bit different about planting an oak. I’d really like to plant some – to watch them growing over the years. Somehow it’s easier to think about a possible future oak than it is to visualize the past of one stood in front of me.
The Handmaid’s Tale
I’ve been watching the TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale. I read the book, so many years ago, but this time it’s been much more powerful – the realization that this is not just a sci-fi imagining, not just a possibility, but it has been and even more is a reality for people in the world today. I’m not sure if it’s the difference in the world or if my powers of imagination and perspective have grown; either way it’s made for uncomfortable watching.
Fireflies 