## Metadata * Author: [[John Fowles]] * ASIN: B003VIWNMG * ISBN: 0099282836 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003VIWNMG ## Highlights But trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times: here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous—never plodding, mechanical, inescapably monotonous. — location: [130](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=130) ^ref-62186 --- I very early decided that London was synonymous with physical exhaustion and nervous anxiety, and that the one thing I would never be was a commuter—a — location: [147](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=147) ^ref-36512 --- He was given a taste of the life of the officer and gentleman, especially in the post-war period when he was in the occupation army in Germany. From then on he was condemned to the ethos and aspirations of a class, or way of life, that his increasingly unsuccessful business did not permit; and which our actual family background made rather absurd. — location: [150](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=150) ^ref-60214 --- always in daily exile. — location: [196](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=196) ^ref-65320 --- Successful artistic parents seem very rarely to give birth to equally successful artistic sons and daughters, and I suspect it may be because the urge to create, which must always be partly the need to escape everyday reality, is better fostered—despite modern educational theory—not by a sympathetic and ‘creative’ childhood environment, but the very opposite, by pruning and confining natural instinct. (Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.) That I should have differed so much from my father in this seems to me in retrospect not in the least a matter for Oedipal guilt, but a healthy natural process, just as the branches of a healthy tree do not try to occupy one another’s territory. The tree in fact has biochemical and light-sensitive systems to prevent this pointless and wasteful secondary invasion of one branch’s occupied space by another. The fact that the two branches grow in different directions and ways does not mean that they do not share a same mechanism of need, a same set of deeper rules. — location: [251](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=251) ^ref-7571 --- famous shrine for lovers of nature, like Selborne or Coate Farm or Waiden Pond. — location: [283](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=283) ^ref-37389 --- In the colonial organism, the green coral, of the wood or forest, experience, adventure, aesthetic pleasure, I think I could even say truth, all lie for me beyond the canopy and exterior wall of leaves, and beyond the individual. — location: [291](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=291) ^ref-5369 --- It is only because such a vast sum of interactions and coincidences in time and place is beyond science’s calculation (a scientist might say, beyond useful function, even if calculable) that we so habitually ignore it, and treat the flight of the bird and the branch it flies from, the leaf in the wind and its shadow on the ground, as separate events, or riddles—what bird? — location: [310](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=310) ^ref-46533 --- Everyday ones grow mute with familiarity, so known they become unknown. — location: [328](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=328) ^ref-24551 --- But what I gain most from nature is beyond words. To try to capture it verbally immediately places me in the same boat as the namers and would-be owners of nature: that is, it exiles me from what I most need to learn. — location: [350](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=350) ^ref-54620 --- the most harmful change brought about by Victorian science in our attitude to nature lies in the demand that our relation with it must be purposive, industrious, always seeking greater knowledge. — location: [355](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=355) ^ref-52760 --- far saner eighteenth-century attitude, which viewed nature as a mirror for philosophers, as an evoker of emotion, as a pleasure, a poem, was forgotten. — location: [359](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=359) ^ref-22874 --- Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science’s powers to analyse. — location: [386](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=386) ^ref-59808 --- The subtlest of our alienations from it, the most difficult to comprehend, is our need to use it in some way, to derive some personal yield. We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability—however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it. — location: [413](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=413) ^ref-30022 --- No art is truly teachable in its essence. All the knowledge in the world of its techniques can provide in itself no more than imitations or replicas of previous art. — location: [437](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=437) ^ref-3016 --- Once Joyce has written, Picasso painted, Webern composed, it requires only a minimal gift, besides patience and practice, to copy their techniques exactly; yet we all know why this kind of technique-copy, even when it is so painstakingly done—for instance, in painting—that it deceives museum and auction-house experts, is counted worthless beside the work of the original artist. It is not of him or her, it is not art, but imitation. — location: [441](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=441) ^ref-33534 --- I had managed to set the experience in a kind of present past, a having-looked, even as I was temporally and physically still looking. — location: [514](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=514) ^ref-31381 --- It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same result. — location: [516](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=516) ^ref-3678 --- We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness. — location: [520](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=520) ^ref-62991 --- addict us to purpose: — location: [528](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=528) ^ref-29667 --- This addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield, has now infiltrated all aspects of our lives—and become effectively synonymous with pleasure. The modern version of hell is purposelessness. — location: [529](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=529) ^ref-48433 --- The Neolithic peoples, the slaves, as we are of an industrial economy, of their own great new cultural ‘invention’ of farming, were the first great deforesters of our landscapes, and perhaps it was guilt that made them return to the trees to find a model for their religious buildings—in — location: [580](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=580) ^ref-45204 --- Nowhere are the two great contemporary modes of reproducing reality, the word and the camera, more at a loss; less able to capture the sound (or soundlessness) and the scents, the temperatures and moods, the all-roundness, the different levels of being in the vertical ascent from ground to tree-top, in the range of different forms of life and the subtlety of their inter-relationships. — location: [585](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=585) ^ref-6924 --- In a way woods are like the sea, sensorially far too various and immense for anything but surfaces or glimpses to be captured. They defeat view-finder, drawing-paper, canvas, they cannot be framed; and words are as futile, hopelessly too laborious and used to capture the reality. — location: [588](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=588) ^ref-47488 --- We have simply transferred the tree setting to the now more familiar brick-and-concrete forest of town and city. Certain juxtapositions of tree and building, especially in city hearts, and perhaps most strikingly of all in New York, have always rather touched me: the sight of those literal and symbolic leaf-walls standing side by side, half-hiding, half-revealing, can be strangely poetic, and not just in architectural terms. — location: [598](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=598) ^ref-41119 --- Older and less planned quarters of cities and towns are profoundly woodlike, and especially in this matter of the mode of their passage through us, the way they unreel, disorientate, open, close, surprise, please. — location: [601](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=601) ^ref-65129 --- The stupidest mistake of all the many stupid mistakes of twentieth-century architecture has been to forget this ancient model in the more grandiose town-planning. Geometric, linear cities make geometric, linear people; wood cities make human beings. — location: [603](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=603) ^ref-32231 --- One is that knowing it fully is an art as well as a science. — location: [700](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=700) ^ref-2369 --- The last is that this kind of knowledge, or relationship, is not reproducible by any other means—by painting, by photography, by words, by science itself. They may encourage, foster and help induce the art of the relationship; but they cannot reproduce it, any more than a painting can reproduce a symphony, or the reverse. Ultimately they can only serve as an inferior substitute, especially if we use them, as some people use sexual relationships, merely to flatter and justify ourselves. — location: [701](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B003VIWNMG&location=701) ^ref-28247 ---