English Books Berlin

“Slowly he would slide over the plaster until he was six inches or so away from his prey, whereupon he stopped for a second and you could see his padded toes moving as he made his grip on the plaster more secure. His eyes would become more protuberant with excitement, what he imagined to be a look of blood-curdling ferocity would spread over his face, the tip of his tail would twitch minutely, and then he would skim across the ceiling as smoothly as a drop of water, there would be a faint snap, and he would turn around, and expression of smug happiness on his face, the lacewing inside his mouth with its legs and wings trailing over his lips like a strange, quivering walrus moustache. He would wag his tail vigourously, like an excited puppy, and then trot back to his resting place to consume his meal in comfort.
As soon as she realized that I was attempting to capture her, she whirled round and stood up on end, her pale, jade-green wings outspread, her toothed arms curved upwards in a warning gesture of defiance. Amused at her belligerence towards a creature so much bigger than herself, I casually caught her around the thorax between finger and thumb. Instantly, her long, sharp arms reached over her back and closed on my thumb, and it felt as though half a dozen needles had been driven through my skin. (…) This time Geronimo was wiser and grasped one of Cicely‘s sharp forearms in his mouth. She retaliated by grabbing him round the neck with the other arm. Both were at an equal disadvantage on the blanket, for their toes and claws got caught in it and tripped them up. They struggled to and fro across the bed, and then started to work their way up towards the pillow. By now they were both looking very much the worse for wear: Cicely had a wing crushed and torn and one leg bent and useless, while Geronimo had a great number of bloody scratches across his back and neck caused by Cicely’s front claws. I was now far too interested to see who was going to win to dream of stopping them, so I vacated the bed as they neared the pillow, for I had no desire to have one of Cicely‘s claw dug into my chest.”

“Nothing - and I mean, really, absolutely nothing - is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilised - more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railway lines - and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. (…) In terms of natural wonders, you know, Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-lanes, sheep-dotted, plumply hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated eight 88,386 square miles the world has known - none of it undertaken with aesthetics in mind, but all of it adding up to something that is, quite often, perfect.”

The audio version is superb.
“It seem sumtimes you jest gotta put up wif your friends. Dey gonna do what dey gonna do.” “Jim, you work the mules and you fix the wagon wheels and now you fixin’ this here porch. Who taught you to do all them things?” I stopped and looked at the hammer in my hand, flipped it. “Dat be a good question, Huck.” “So, who did?” “Necessity.” “What?” “‘Cessity,” I corrected myself, “‘Cessity is when you gots to do sumptin’ or else.” “Or else what?” “Else’n they takes you to the post and whips ya or they drags you down to the river and sells ya. Nuffin you got to worry ‘bout.” He looked at the sky. He pondered on that a bit. “Sho is pretty when you jest look at the sky with nothin’ in it, jest blue. I heard tell there are names for different blues. And reds and the like. I wonder what you call that blue.” “‘Robin‘s egg,’” I said. “You ever seen a robin‘s egg?” “You right, Jim. It is like a robin‘s egg, ‘ceptin’ it ain’t got the speckles.” I nodded. “Dat be why you gots to look past the speckles.” “Robin’s egg,” Huck said, again.

“‘I couldn’t qualify for a deferment, and my parents didn’t have any pull, so I got shipped off to Basic. They shaved my head, gave me a new wardrobe, taught me a bit about being a soldier, and then sent me to Vietnam. I was what they called a ‘quickie’. The army needed lots of young fighters over there, so they sent us whether we were ready or not.
And it was like, when we saw each other, we were both thinking, did we really live through that? Were we really there? And I think we both hurt for each other. Then I grabbed him, and we held onto each other, and I swear it felt like we were begging for forgiveness or something, not just for being soldiers in that war but also for being part of a world that can do such godawful things.
If nothing else, the war made me honest. Opened my eyes. It cured me of any romantic notions I had about the human race. Creatures who are capable of doing the things that happened there don’t have much to brag about. It’s crazy what a jungle and fear and a gun and some misguided patriotism can bring out of a man.
As bad as the guilt and shame and nightmares have been, in some way they give me hope that I still have a conscience and a heart, even if they’re screwed up all to hell up. I hope so. I hate the politicians who sent us there. If there’s such a thing as righteous anger, sane hate, it’s for people like that. I hated what they did then, hate what they do now sometimes.’
He asked me this morning if a cello is like a big ukulele. He called it and nuclear uke and then a nuke uke and then a uke on Vi**ra.
Asher, we are masters at masking our sadness, but deep down inside, if we are honest, we know that there is an unsatisfied longing deep inside all of us. Your portraits invite people to be alone and quiet and truthful with themselves; to admit the longing and to discover the goodness in their sadness.
You tell me. Where does night come from? Tom came up with it. He says there are five billion trees in the world.… Anyway, Tom says that under every single tree, there is some shade, like those trees over there.… Look at all that shade. And at the end of every day, the shade crawls out from under the five billion trees and gets above the trees, and that’s what makes night time.
It was a piece of wood, the size and shape of a soup can. Both ends were flat and smooth. On one end, small holes – two or three dozen of them - had been drilled or punched into the wood. The bark of the tree, light grey, was still intact.… ‘It’s called Featherwood. I invented it. Here’s how you use it.’ (…) As Theo held the wood, she began to place individual feathers into each small hole. She did so with the carefulness of a florist arranging a bridal bouquet. The result was exquisite. Swatches of grey, brown, rose, red, blue, speckles, and white looked like a forest in miniature, a stand of conifers, broad at the bottoms, narrow at the tops, some tall and slender, others short and stubby.
The phrase “poisonous beauty” formed in his mind. He wondered if there might be other things that, like Azaleas, were beautiful and toxic at the same time. Let me think… rattlesnake, jellyfish, hemlock, black widow, words without wisdom, power without compassion, appetite without boundaries, pleasure without gratitude, art without humility…”

“The Baitâl Pachchisi is said to be one of the oldest story collections in existence. It was written down more than a thousand years ago, but the stories themselves are all at least two or three times as old. This famous and feared collection lives in many ancient as well as modern languages. It embodies the continuity of human propensities whose lasting power we may often prefer to ignore.
There is the vetāla, a co**se that lives when retelling the stories that continue to entrap the king. The king is caught in illusions produced by a co**se; his life is imprisoned in tales from the past, tales of deception from times that are no more. And all of this is at the behest of the Yogi, as he seeks to control the world and to rewrite history.
What we see here are people possessed by deities, social roles, and passions; they are captured and moved by lust, hate, covetousness, desire for place and power. (…) This is a world of continuous, indiscriminate, impersonal cruelty. The most common, at least in the Vetāla tales, is love. Falling in love, whether mutual or one-sided, is something that arrives from outside as lovers are struck by the arrows of lust shot from the bow of K**a, god of desire. It’s unaccountable, haphazard, all-consuming, and it defines the lover’s fate ever after. Envy, hatred, spiritual ambition, and craving for wealth or power proceed as men and women fall prey to these exacting masters. Plots or stories all begin and are shaped by these interventions that dictate the possibilities and outcomes available to otherwise unsuspecting person.
Stories, even as they live enduringly within us, never quite integrate themselves into our being. Like a virus, like a symbiont, they condition our existence but are independent of it. Our inner lives are made up of innumerable webs of histories, memories, and narratives. At the same time, as we move through life, we are inside other stories, other people’s stories, alien histories, floating in an endless sea of tales, fables, gossip. These carry their own domains and links within them, and they last much longer than we do. Our existence beyond the bounds of a single life, as well as our posterity, depends entirely on them, on becoming one of them. It is through stories and tales and accounts of all kinds, that we move – continuously, constantly - in and beyond the limits of a single lifespan.”
As King Vikramāditya strode on with his co**se spirit burden, all that could be heard were the cries of foxes, the snapping of twigs, and dew dripping from the leaves. The king could barely hear the vetāla’s whisper. “Great king, I wish I knew stories of a better, happier world, but, alas, it’s not so. Why, even birds find themselves shocked by what they see here. Listen.” The vetāla paused, then began.

The further up the track, the closer and more tantalising where the stars. I could’ve plucked them and packed the pockets of my coats with their jewels. Somewhere in the trees down by the brook, a vixen screamed for a mate; the sound, one of the saddest in the world, stone-skipped down the hard earth of frosted valley into nothingness.
In Greek mythology, the goddess Nyx, wearing a star-studded black robe, emerged from a cave to ride across the sky in a chariot pulled by black steeds. She was Night, and she was Death. The night, in the human mind, became the abode of sprites, goblins, witches, and monsters. For years, according to the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, the ravening creature Grendel attacked the mead hall of of Heorot, and consumed men unlucky enough to fall into its claws. Fear of the dark is fear of the unknown.
The signs of spring in the mountains were few; then again March itself is a month of paradox. The official first month of spring could equally be termed the last month of winter. Its old English name was Hlyda, meaning ‘loud’, in recognition of its tendency to be stormy. Unruly. Hibernal. The only unambiguous primaveral potent was the bud burst of the Silver birch trees along the bank of the lake. From every twig small green flames erupted. Budburst. The darling budburst of March.
On a nightwalk, the mind itself wanders. The night is a parallel dimension. Alone in the landscape - for hardly anyone nightwalks - the liberation from the pettifogging details of daily life, such as the shopping list and school pickup, is intoxicating. You will never be so free as you are at night under the moon and stars. You could drown in the delight of it. Quite solipsistic, nightwalking. And exercise in ego. A sequence of ontological propositions. Solvitur ambulando. The Latin for ‘It is solved by walking.’ When afoot thoughts emerge spontaneously, effortlessly, like water from a hillside spring.

Either the Darkness alters -/ Or something in the sight / Adjusts itself to Midnight -/ And Life steps almost straight. Emily Dickinson.
We went on homewards through a long dark night that was the original, pristine black of the universe. But the feeling of the wind - which was slight and constant - on my face enabled me to negotiate my way forward: an eddy signalled a tree trunk; flowing wind indicated safe passage. Even so, a stump would have stumped me except for the happenstance that it was glowing green - the result of chemical processes in honey fungus (Armillaria mellea) as it is succoured by decaying wood, oak especially. (…) Bioluminescence in fungi is called Foxfire; of the 100,000 species of fungi, only about eighty glow in the dark. (…) I cannot say that the oak stump on a hill above the Monnow burned brightly, but the ghostly neon (made, on close inspection, of a thousand dots) was visible, and it was marvellous. Something about the encounter with Foxfire, my first in thirty years of night walking, put light in our eyes.
A fox is equipped by biology for life after dark; the fox can control the amount of light that passes through the lens of its eye to an extraordinary degree. In the dark the fox’s pupil is large and round; beneath the light-sensitive cells is the tapetum lucidum, a layer of connective tissue that provides the fox with night vision (allowing about twice the light available to the human eye). (…) The fox’s whiskers mean that it can ‘feel’ in the dark. I can imitate a fox, but I can never be one. I can partake of the night, but I will never be of the night. And I am glad. If I was properly nocturnal, I would be as a fish in water, a swift in the air. I would be in my element, and might I not lose that explorer’s wonder when I ventured out into the dark island of Britain? (Almost sounds like a reply to Charles Foster. Plus: light pollution is a huge and devastating problem.)

The smell of the cuts overwhelms him. Damp spice drawer. Dank wool. Rusty nails. Pickled peppers. Scents that return him to childhood. Aromas that inject him with inexplicable happiness. Smells that plunge him down to the bottom of the deepest well and hold him there for hours. Then there’s the sound, like his ears are wadded up with pillow. The snarls of saws and feller bunchers, somewhere in the distance. A great truth comes over him: trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.
We know so little about how trees grow. Almost nothing about how they bloom and branch and shed and heal themselves. We’ve learned a little about a few of them, in isolation. But nothing is less isolated or more social than a tree.
This gospel of new forestry is confirmed by the most wonderful findings: beards of lichen high in the air, that grow only on the oldest trees and inject essential nitrogen back into the living system. Subterranean voles that feed on truffles and spread the spores of angel fungi across the forest floor. Fungi that infuse into the roots of trees in partnerships so tight it’s hard to say where one organism leaves off and the other begins. Hulking conifers that sprout adventitious roots high into the canopy that dip back down to feed on the mats of soil accumulating in the vees their own branches.
Down through the clearing, there’s a feller buncher, snatching batches of small trunks, delimbing them, and bucking the logs to fixed lengths, doing in a day what a team of human cutters would need a week to get through. (…) She’s learned of machines that drop their maws onto fifty-foot trees and grind them to the ground faster than a food processor can shred a carrot. Machines that stack logs like toothpicks and haul them to mills were twenty-foot trunks twirl on spits so fast that the touch of an angled blade shaves off the flesh in a continuous layer of veneer.
The myths come back to her in this tropical upland, stories from her own childhood and the world’s The young person‘s Ovid her father gave her. Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.… People who, in an instant, sink sudden roots and grow bark. Trees that, for a little while, can still speak, lift up their roots, and move.
We, the five of us. No separate trees in a forest. What have they hoped to win? Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that’s where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.
Already their creatures swallow up whole continents of data, finding in them the most surprising patterns. Nothing needs to start from scratch. There’s so much digital germplasm already in the public domain. The coders tell the listeners nothing except how to look.

Colour depletes the greys, browns, black. Cold air pushes past. Above is solid rock, utter matter. The surface is scarcely thinkable. The passage is taken; the maze builds. Slide-rifts curl off. Direction is difficult to keep. Space is behaving strangely - and so too is time. Time moves differently here in the Underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows.
We all carry trace fossils within us - the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace - and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.
In the language of forestry and forest ecology, the understorey is the name given to the life that exists between the forest floor and the tree canopy: the fungi, mosses, lichens, bushes and saplings that thrive and compete in this mid-zone. Metaphorically, though, the understorey is also the sum of the entangled, ever-growing narratives, histories, ideas and words that interweave to give a wood or forest its diverse life in culture.
What’s the haunting phrase I’ve heard used to describe the realm of fungi? The kingdom of the grey. It speaks of fungi’s utter otherness – the challenges they issue to our usual models of time, space and species.
Rivers disappear and so do stories, only to rise again in unexpected places.
We are terranauts and we have dropped through the roof of this chamber onto another planet - dropped into an underland desert of fine-grained black-gold sand. I shake my head in wonder and fear.
The Kalevala is fascinated by the underland;, by the safe storage of dangerous materials and the safe retrieval of precious materials. (…) The Sampo grinds out flour, it grinds out money - and it grinds out time. One of its given tasks is to grind out the age of the world, causing epochs to yield to one another in an immense cycle of precessions. The world has changed too much… We are in the Anthropocene.

“There’s a temptation to think of this time of year as a kind of interval between winter and summer. It’s not. It’s like saying that youth is simply a prelude of age. Yes, young people might be impatient to grow up and become adults. And yes, each year we are impatient for summer to be here. But to be strong and fulfilled in life, young people must have time and space for growth, to be encouraged to grow into knowledge and understanding and awareness of the world about them and of themselves and of the part they can play in it. That growing period is not to be rushed through. It is, like spring, the most formative part of new life, not a mere prologue.”
“I talk in the woods quite often, quietly, and often not directly to the trees or to invisible badgers, but to myself. Sometimes, I even tell them the stories I’m dreaming up. It’s strange, but the more I touch them and talk, the more time I spend in among them, the closer I feel I come to know and understand them, the stronger my connection, the stronger my affection. I do hug trees, I do lean on their companionship. I know them, and they know me. I’m in those woods more than anyone. They’re used to having me around. So I can joke and tease, and feel they don’t mind. I often sit down and lean back against their trunks to listen to them. I have even done what bears, I know, do sometimes in the forest of Canada and other wild places. I rub my back up against them to satisfy an itch. I’ve become ever more fascinated by wrinkles in their bark. The deeper the wrinkles the older they are, of course, like elephants, like me. And in among the trees in bluebell wood I can talk, or even shout; I can cry, too. It’s a holy place to me, precious, private. As woods have often been to people over the centuries. Like a church, but better in a way. No priest, no judging. I listen to the whisper of the trees, and they listen to me. I must’ve touched every tree in bluebell wood by now, over the last fifty or so years. They are good companions to me, they shade me against the heat, shelter me from storm and wind from ‘the slings and arrows’ of life.”

Other than waiting around at airports, being airborne for a considerable time and the pilot ex-wife, there is not half as much relevance of the element in here as in the other three volumes. Tying a couple of loose strings, it’s still the least powerful of the four.
“I plunge back down now, blocking out all the noise of the world around me, but keep my eyes open, staring into the dark black depths of the water, feeling the tug of the earth, the fire within me and the air that remains in my lungs. I’m not there yet, but one day I will be. At one with myself, at one with the universe, and – finally – at one with the elements.”