The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [39]
Little Ambleside had the bustle of a metropolis. Lorries were noisily unloading their goods outside shops, there were placards everywhere advertising restaurants and hotels, and though it was still early, the tea shops were full. On racks outside newsagents' stalls, the papers reported on the latest development in a political scandal in London.
A few miles northwest of the town, in the Great Langdale Valley, the atmosphere was transformed. For the first time since arriving in the Lake District, we were in deep countryside, where nature was more in evidence than humans. On either side of the path stood a number of oak trees. Each one grew far from the shadow of its neighbour, in fields so appetising to sheep as to have been eaten down to a perfect lawn. The oaks were of noble bearing: they did not trail their branches on the ground as willows are wont to do, nor did their leaves have the dishevelled appearance common to certain poplars, which can look from close up as though they have been awoken in the middle of the night and not had time to fix their hair. Instead they gathered their lower branches tightly under themselves, while their upper branches grew in small, orderly steps. The result was a rich green foliage in an almost perfect circle, like an archetypal tree drawn by a child.
The rain, which continued to fall confidently despite the promises of the landlord, gave us a sense of the mass of the oaks. From under their damp canopy, rain could be heard falling on forty thousand leaves, creating a harmonious pitter-patter that varied in pitch according to whether the water dripped onto a large or a small leaf, a high or a low one, one loaded with accumulated water or not. The trees themselves were an image of ordered complexity: the roots patiently drew nutrients from the soil, and the capillaries of the trunks sent water twenty-five metres upwards, each branch taking enough but not too much for the needs of its own leaves, each leaf in turn contributing to the maintenance of the whole. The trees were an image of patience, for they would sit out this rainy morning and the many that would follow it without complaint, adjusting themselves to the slow shift of the seasons, showing no ill temper in a storm, no desire to wander from their spot for an impetuous journey across to another valley—content to keep their many slender fingers deep in the clammy soil, metres from their central stems and far from those tallest leaves that held the rainwater in their palms.
Wordsworth enjoyed sitting beneath oaks, listening to the rain or watching sunbeams fracture across their leaves. What he saw as the patience and dignity of the trees seemed to him characteristic of nature's works, which were to be valued for holding up,
before the mind intoxicate
With present objects, and the busy dance
Of things that pass away, a temperate show
Of objects that endure.
Nature would, he proposed, dispose us to seek out in life and in one another ‘whate'er there is desirable and good'. An ‘image of right reason', nature would temper the crooked impulses of urban life.
If we are to accept (even in part) Wordsworth's argument, we may need to concede a prior principle holding that our identities are to a greater or lesser extent malleable, changing according to whom—and sometimes what—we are with. The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy. Thus A's obsession with status and hierarchy may—almost imperceptibly—lead B to worry