The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [40]
What, then, may be expected to happen to a person's identity in the company of a cataract or a mountain, an oak tree or a celandine, objects that after all have no conscious concerns and so, it would seem, can neither encourage nor censor particular behaviours? And yet an inanimate object may, to come to the linchpin of Wordsworth's claim for the beneficial effects of nature, still work an influence on those around it. Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us—oaks dignity, pines resolution, lakes calm—and therefore may, in unobtrusive ways, act as inspirations to virtue.
In a letter written to a young student in the summer of 1802, addressing the task of poetry, Wordsworth came close to specifying the values that he felt nature embodied: A great Poet… ought to a certain degree to rectify men's feelings… to render their feelings more sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature.'
In every natural landscape, Wordsworth found instances of such sanity, purity and permanence. Flowers, for example, were models of humility and meekness:
Sweet silent Creature!
That breath'st with me in sun and air,
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature!
Animals, for their part, were paragons of stoicism. Wordsworth at one point became quite attached to a bluetit that even in the worst weather sang in the orchard above Dove Cottage. During their first, freezing winter there, the poet and his sister were inspired by a pair of swans that were also new to the area, and that endured the cold with greater patience than the Wordsworths.
An hour up the Langdale Valley, the rain having abated, M. and I hear a faint tseep, rapidly repeated, alternating with a louder tissip. Three meadow pipits are flying out of a patch of rough grass. A black-eared wheatear is looking pensive on a conifer branch, warming its pale sandy-buff feathers in the late-summer sun. Stirred by something, it takes off and circles the valley, releasing a rapid and high-pitched schwer, schwee, schwee-oo. The sound has no effect on a caterpillar that was walking strenuously across a rock, nor on the many sheep dotted across the valley floor.
One of the sheep ambles towards the path and looks curiously at his visitors. Humans and sheep stare at each other in wonder. After a moment, the sheep sinks into a reclining pose and takes a lazy mouthful of grass, which he chews on one side of his mouth, as if it were gum. What makes me me and him him? Another sheep approaches and lies down next to his companion, wool to wool, and for a second they exchange what appears to be a knowing, mildly amused glance.
A few meters ahead, from inside a deep-green bush that runs down to a stream comes a noise like the sound of a lethargic old man clearing his throat after a heavy lunch. It is followed by an incongruously frantic rustle, as though someone was rifling through a bed of leaves in an irritated search for a valuable possession. But on noticing that it has company, the creature falls silent—the tense silence of a child holding his or her breath at the back of a clothes cupboard during a game of hide-and-seek. Back in Ambleside, people are buying newspapers and eating scones, while out here, buried in a bush, is a thing, probably with fur and perhaps a tail, interested in eating berries or flies, scurrying in the foliage and grunting—and yet still, for all its oddities, a contemporary, a fellow sleeping and breathing creature alive on this singular planet in a universe otherwise made up chiefly of rocks and vapours and silence.
One of Wordsworth's poetic ambitions was to induce us to see the many animals living alongside us that we typically ignore, registering them only out of the corner of our eyes and feeling no appreciation for what they are up to and want: shadowy, generic presences such