Nowadays I really only travel in the mind. Many blessings – no security checks; no immigration or customs hassle, instantaneous arrival at fascinating destinations. The 16th century playwright, Ben Jonson, from quite young kept a book in which he copied down passages which especially pleased him and which he found particularly “apt, wise or rightly formed.” He called the book which he made out of such passages Discoveries. It was his mind-travelling. Here are some of my discoveries.
I read with complete delight the autobiography of E.O. Wilson, the great naturalist. When he was elected a member of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, he, as with all fellows before him, was given the following charge: “You have been elected as a member of this Society for your personal prospect of achievement in your chosen field, and your promise of notable contributions to knowledge and thought. That promise you must redeem with your whole intellect and moral force…..You will seek not a near, but a distant, objective, and you will not be satisfied with what you have done. All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern, which from his separate approach every true scholar is striving to descry.”
Wilson’s great work was on ants. Environmentally, ants are a far more important species than man. “If we were to vanish today, the land envionment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear tens of thousands of other plant and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land eco-systems everywhere.”
In plays notice how the scenes get shorter and the action speeds up towards the end. In childhood, afternoons extend for seeming years but for the old years flicker past like brief afternoons. After eighty, the playwright Christopher Fry pointed out, you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes. And what is particularly mortifying is how much time is wasted: as Lord Byron entered in his journal, “When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning – how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.”
But then, beyond this summer of a dormouse, there is some hope of immortality. For the deeply religious that is a certainty which it must be good to experience. For those with children – and in my case grand-children – there is the smaller but still triumphant satisfaction that one has found a way to outlive mortality. Thomas Hardy put it exactly in his poem “Heredity”:
“I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace,
Through time to time anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man
That heeds no call to die.”
