The Tree
John Fowles
Language: English
Pages: 112
ISBN: 0061997773
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“For years I have carried this book...with me on travels to reread, ponder, envy. In prose of classic gravity, precision, and delicacy, Fowles addresses matters of final importance.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The Tree is the fullest and finest exploration I’ve ever read of how the useless delights to be discovered in nature can ripen into the practice of art.”
—Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift
“The most original argument for wilderness preservation I have encountered.”
—Washington Post
Finally back in print, here is the 30th anniversary edition of The Tree—the renowned English novelist John Fowles’s (The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman) moving meditation on the connection between the natural world and human creativity. An inspiring modern ecological classic, The Tree is both a powerful argument against taming the wild and a major author’s inspiring and beautifully written defense of “the joys of getting lost,” and of spontaneity in life and art.
dismissed as non-scientific and inegalitarian. It is not a gift beyond personal choice, but one that can be acquired, like knowledge of science, by rote, recipe and hard work. Elsewhere we become so patterned and persuaded by the tone of the more serious reviewing of art in our magazines and newspapers that we no longer notice their overwhelmingly scientific tone, or the paradox of this knowing-naming technique being applied to a non-scientific object—one whose production the artist himself
any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems most promising at any given point, not some itinerary decided before entry. I am quite sure this is not some kind of rationalization, or irrationalization, after the fact; that having discovered I write fiction in a disgracefully haphazard sort of way, I now hit on the passage through an unknown wood as an analogy. It is the peculiar nature of my adolescent explorings of the Devon countryside (peculiar because I had not
self-preservation that has allowed man, despite his ancient fears of what they may harbour in terms of other creatures and the supernatural, to forgive them in one aspect, to see something that is also protective, maternal, even womb-like in their silent depths. All through history trees have provided sanctuary and refuge for both the justly and the unjustly persecuted and hunted. In the wood I know best there is a dell, among beeches, at the foot of a chalk cliff. Not a person a month goes
it—and taught me the delicate art of ‘setting’ what we caught. Then there were two cousins, much older than I was. The first was a tea planter in Kenya, a keen fly fisherman and big game shot, and indisputably to me, on his occasional home leaves and visits to us, the luckiest man in the world. The other was that indispensable member of any decent middle-class English family, a determined eccentric, who no more fitted suburbia and its values than a hedgehog fits a settee. He managed to combine a
cultivated, though not in a literal sense. He would not have understood that something I saw down there just an hour ago, at this moment I write—two tawny owlets fresh out of the nest, sitting on a sycamore branch like a pair of badly knitted Christmas stockings and ogling down at this intruder into their garden—means to me exactly what the Horticultural Society cups on his sideboard used to mean to him: a token of order in unjust chaos, the reward of perseverance in a right philosophy. That his