The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [42]
This was no hyperbole. Decades later, the Alps would continue to live within him and to strengthen his spirit whenever he evoked them. Their survival led him to argue that we may see in nature certain scenes that will stay with us throughout our lives and offer us, every time they enter our consciousness, both a contrast to and relief from present difficulties. He termed such experiences in nature ‘spots of time':
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue…
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This belief in small, critical moments in nature explains Wordsworth's unusually specific way of subtitling many of his poems. The subtitle of ‘Tintern Abbey', for example—'On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798'—cites an exact day month and year to suggest that a few moments in the countryside overlooking a valley could number among the most significant and useful of one's life, and be as worthy of precise remembrance as a birthday or a wedding.
I, too, was granted a ‘spot of time'. It occurred in the late afternoon of the second day of our visit to the Lake District. M. and I were sitting on a bench near Ambleside eating chocolate bars. We had exchanged a few words about which kinds of chocolate bars we preferred. M. said she liked caramel-filled ones, I expressed a greater interest in the dry biscuity sort, and then we fell silent and I looked out across a field to a clump of trees by a stream. There were a host of different colours in the trees, sharp gradations of green, as if someone had fanned out samples from a colour chart. These trees gave off an impression of astonishing health and exuberance. They seemed not to care that the world was old and often sad. I was tempted to bury my face in them so as to be restored by their smell. It seemed extraordinary that nature could on its own, without any concern for the happiness of two people eating chocolate on a bench, have come up with a scene so utterly suited to a human sense of beauty and proportion.
My receptivity to the scene lasted only a minute. Thoughts of work then intruded, and M. suggested that we return to the inn so she could make a phone call. I was unaware of having fixed the scene in my memory until, one midafternoon in London, I was waiting in a traffic jam, oppressed by cares, and the trees came back to me, pushing aside a raft of meetings and unanswered correspondence and asserting themselves in my consciousness. I was carried away from the traffic and the crowds and returned to trees whose names I didn't know but which I could see as clearly as if they were standing before me. These trees provided a ledge against which I could rest my thoughts; they protected me from the eddies of anxiety and, in a small way that afternoon, contributed a reason to be alive.
At eleven o'clock in the morning on 15 April 1802, Wordsworth saw some daffodils along the western shore of Ullswater Lake, a few miles north of where M. and I stayed. There were some ten thousand of these flowers ‘dancing in the breeze', he wrote. The waves of the lake seemed to dance beside them, too, though the daffodils ‘outdid the sparkling waves in glee'. ‘What wealth the shew to me had brought', he explained of a moment that would become, for him, a spot of time:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood.
They flash upon that inward eye …
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.
An unfortunate last line perhaps, open to Byronic accusations of being ‘namby-pamby', but nevertheless offering the consoling idea that in vacant or pensive moods, in traffic in the city's ‘turbulent world', we may also draw on images of our travels through nature, images of a group of trees or a spread of daffodils on the shores of a lake, and with their help, blunt a little the forces of ‘enmity and low desires'.
On Travelling in the Lake District,
14—18 September 2000