I re-land

I am writing this text at my house in Co Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland.  This is my first visit for twelve months, my first journey into the European Union since the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland formally exited.  Flying from London to Belfast was my first trip by plane for a year and, for some reason I am not fully certain of, it was comforting to travel at altitude once more.  I am glad to be back.

The house was in good condition, despite the absence of occupants for a year.  My neighbour checks in regularly and my local contractor fixed a problem with the heating system over the winter.  There are no signs of damp or water damage, no broken tiles or windowpanes, and the plumbing and electrics all seem to be working well.  I have replaced the batteries in the smoke alarms and defrosted the freezer, and in addition I have given all the rooms a thorough clean since I discovered a greater than usual number of spider’s webs and a plenitude of dead flies. Most of the latter were scattered across the floors: I imagine the flies entered the house via the vents in the windows but could not find their way back out again and died of cold, hunger, or old age.  A few were tangled up in webs, but I suspect most of the flies that were trapped that way had already been eaten.  The war between the Arachnids and the Muscidæ lacks the graphic intensity of Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw” and does not stir the passions as that between the Jets and the Sharks, but it is nonetheless one small part of the cosmic evolutionary struggle.  The detritus of battle was soon sucked up by my vacuum cleaner, and the house feels more comfortable for humans as a result.

The day after I arrived, I went into the sea to splash around in the waves.  The weather was unusually windless and mild, consequently the waves were placid, but I did not let that spoil my pleasure of being moved by the flow of the tide and the taste of salt water in my face.  Swimming up and down a 50m pool for thirty minutes is good as a form of exercise, but it cannot compare to the joy of twenty minutes jumping around in the Atlantic Ocean.  Part of the pleasure is connected to the sense of isolation and spaciousness, of being far away – temporarily – from the crowds and the hastiness of city life.  While I was in the sea, I noted three surfers and one walker on the beach, which is about 2km in length.  We all had plenty of room.

Yesterday, I went for a walk.  The cloud was low and the weather changeable, so I decided not to venture up one of the local mountains.  These are small by global standards – Mount Errigal, the tallest, is only 750m above sea level – but the views (when the cloud level is higher than the peaks) are spectacular.  Instead, I walked along the quiet lanes that take me from my house out towards the moors, where there is a disused railway track and a small lake.  There is useful exercise to be taken by walking for two or three hours up and down the local inclines but, as with my trip to the sea, the experience of being alone for a while, surrounded by pleasing scenery, surpasses the physical health benefits.  The sense of being in and part of nature, the contrast between an afternoon amid the hills of Donegal compared with my normal daily experience in London, all contribute to the feeling that these moments are special, precious, and memorable.

By coincidence, I came across the following sentence in the book I was reading that same day: Finally [Petrarch] was, as everyone knows, the first man to climb a mountain for its own sake, and to enjoy the view from the top.  Unlike “everyone”, I did not know this.  I completed school and my undergraduate degree without ever hearing the name Petrarch, let alone knowing that he climbed Mont Ventoux just to see the view.  While he might have been the first Western European writer to describe his trip up a mountain, I find it impossible to believe that no-one in Tibet or Chile had climbed a mountain for the sake of getting to the summit before 1336CE.   The author of this implausible sentence was Kenneth Clark, the English art historian, and it comes from a book called Landscape into Art which was first published in 1949.  Given his background I find his assumptions, that everyone knows about Petrarch and that the only history that really matters is European history, unsurprising.  That said, the book is very interesting and has made me think in new ways about the genre of landscape painting – and, indeed, the various sub-genres that exist within the broad definition – and makes me want to re-visit galleries in London, Madrid, Paris, Brussels, and New York to look again at many of the pictures he discusses. 

One of the pleasures of walking in the local countryside is the abundance of fuchsia bushes, some of which grow to the size of small trees.  At this time of year, they are flush with their distinctive two-coloured flowers, which even in the mist and drizzle look bright and fresh.  In many places here they form extensive hedgerows of vibrant green and pink.  The plant comes originally from central and south America, was collected and classified by European monks on a trip to Haiti in the seventeenth century, and named in honour of a German botanist, Leonhart Fuchs, who lived in the sixteenth century and documented hundreds of plants that could be used for medicinal purposes.  His surname, translated into English, would be Fox, hence I should perhaps call the plants foxy rather than fuchsia.  In the local small town near to my house, there is a coffee shop named after them, except that the owner did not check the correct order of the letters, so the place is called Fuschia Café.  I wonder if Fuchs’s herbal encyclopædia describes a plant that could cure bad spelling?

By a further coincidence, the other book I have been reading on this trip is a novel by the Brazilian author Julián Fuks, called Resistance.  The narrator, who bears some resemblance to the author, notes that his surname is derived from that of the famous botanist, after whom the fuchsia plant is named.  He also describes how his paternal grandparents fled Germany in the 1920s, to escape the threat of fascism, and made their home in Buenos Aires.  In the 1970s their son, the narrator’s father, fled to Brazil to escape a new and different form of authoritarian violence.  Just as the fuchsia plant has been transported from Latin America to Ireland, where it now flourishes, so too the Fuchs/Fuks family have moved from Germany to Argentina to Brazil, where Julián is thriving as a successful novelist.  His book, which I recommend, reminds me of the multiple interconnections in our world, both natural and literary. 

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, I have visited Ireland less often and I have missed spending time here.  I have also not been able to travel to other cities, which is a loss I feel keenly.   That said, if one is not able to travel, London is a great place to be for it has parks, galleries, and restaurants, and a variety of life that few if any other places can match.   Coming back to Co Donegal after twelve months has made me realise how much I enjoy visiting here, but it has also made me realise how much I value being able to live in London.  Landscape art became a significant form of Western art, I am sure, not just because artists wanted to demonstrate their technical skills at drawing trees and mountains, of creating a sense of perspective into the far distance, and of capturing the tonality of different intensities of light, but also because increasingly their patrons lived in cities and wanted reminders of the countryside that they no longer experienced each day.  As everyone knows, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Coming to Co Donegal is fundamental to the dialectical form of my life.  Most of the time I live in one of the world’s largest and most diverse cities, from where I travel to other cities to look at art museums and to enjoy the contrasting culture and cuisine of a different place.  This is the thesis of my life.  Regularly I retreat from urban life to spend a few days in the wild, windy, and sparsely populated coastline of north-west Ireland, to breathe air of a different quality, to swim, and to walk among the lush foliage.  This is the antithesis of my life.  From these twin impulses, as Hegel might have predicted, a synthesis emerges combining what is best from both, a love of the frenzy but an ability to detach from it, which makes, I think, for a good mix.  My committed metropolitanism is qualified by periodic rural solitude.