The Story of My Heart. Richard Jefferies
Locks of hair, letters, a pocket watch were also on display. Natural history dioramas were plentiful from an era long gone. I was especially drawn to the snowy egrets with their gold painted feet. And up the staircase were the paintings of Kate Tryon, an artist from Naples, Maine, born in 1864, whose obsession with Richard Jefferies in the early 1900s was not unlike our own. She visited the Coate landscape with a desire to paint the places that had inspired Jefferies, pastoral settings where his poetic prose were written. A pleinair painter fell in love with a pleinair writer.
But the place of power in the museum where the spirit of Richard Jefferies spoke to us was on the third floor in the attic where the curators had reconstructed his childhood bedroom. It wasn’t the mannequin of Richard as a boy (black-knickered, white-shirted, and suspendered) lying on his brass bed reading a book with his chin resting on his hand that moved us. Nor was it the rabid-looking red fox, badly mounted, with a snide grin perched on the wooden chest. What moved us was his writing desk, a simple drop-leaf piece of furniture made from pine with thin tapered legs situated in front of the window framed by blue curtains. A small chair with a wicker seat was tucked inside. The window was open. The curtains billowed. There was a vitality here I felt nowhere else.
“To be beautiful and to be calm without mental fear is the ideal of Nature,” Richard Jefferies wrote. “If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.”
Back home, we continued to reread The Story of My Heart. We became obsessed with bringing this book back into print so another generation could encounter his ideas. Ideas like the importance of being idle:
I hope succeeding generations will be able to be idle. I hope that nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time; that they may enjoy their days, and the earth, and the beauty of this beautiful world; that they may rest by the sea and dream; that they may dance and sing, and eat and drink. I will work towards that end with all my heart. If employment they must have—and the restlessness of the mind will require it… They shall not work for bread, but for their souls.
Ideas like humility and the value of Earth’s indifference:
There is nothing human in nature. The earth, though loved so dearly, would let me perish on the ground, and neither bring forth food nor water.
Ideas relevant to the discussion of a sustainable life:
I verily believe that the earth in one year produces enough food to last for thirty. Why then, have we not enough?
When Richard Jefferies says, “The circle of ideas we possess is too limited to aid us. We need ideas as far outside our circle as are outside those that were pondered by Augustus Caesar,” I believe him.
But my growing kinship with Richard Jefferies as a fellow writer of natural history and memoir paled next to my husband’s relationship with him. Day and night, Brooke was reading Jefferies. Night and day, he was quoting him. A river runs itself clear in the night. In other words, goodnight. And this: Let me be fleshly perfect. Translation: I need to go exercise. It got to the point that before leaving home, whether we were going to dinner with friends or to any public gathering, be it a party or a political hearing, Brooke had to promise me he would not bring up Richard Jefferies. Promise after promise was broken. No matter the occasion, Brooke managed to insert Jefferies into the conversation. I began to believe that Brooke and Jefferies were a ventriloquist team. I could no longer tell where Brooke’s voice ended and Jefferies’ voice began.
In the end, I gave up. I simply set a place for Jefferies at the table and let the two of them talk endlessly over breakfast, lunch, and dinner without Brooke ever moving his mouth. It was the look in his eyes. He was a thousand miles away.
But isn’t that how marriages go, we survive one another’s obsessions be it a person, place, or thing. Marriage is the accommodation of nouns. Brooke has survived my love affairs with Hieronymus Bosch, Philip II, and prairie dogs. He has traveled with me to Rwanda and returned home with a son. He has endured the re-enactment of the battle at Gettysburg and attended a Civil War ball. And early on in our marriage, he didn’t say a word when I told him I would be gone for several months studying ophiuroids in the Gulf of California, nor did he balk at our growing library focused on death and dying.
Likewise, I have learned to live with his passions: backcountry skiing, wet wool, two dogs, and dragonflies. Because of Brooke’s obsession with dragonflies, I now know how to distinguish meadowhawks from darners, darners from skimmers, and skimmers from sand dragons. And the absolute certainty that whenever we find ourselves in a landscape of stray rocks (often), Brooke will turn them into standing stones; sculptures perfectly poised on the edge of a river or lake or ocean regardless of the occasion, including wakes and weddings.
I knew the how of Brooke’s obsession with Jefferies; I had been part of it. What I didn’t know was the why.
Last fall, we returned to Maine as we do each year. Richard Jefferies traveled with us. And once again, we read The Story of My Heart out loud outside. But something had changed. This time, when Brooke read the words of Richard Jefferies he was no longer reading them with a sense of curiosity and astonishment, he was reading them alive. He was reading them passionately, lyrically, and when called for, emphatically. I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek—my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever had has satisfied my soul. He exhorted the ocean to answer Jefferies’ questions: Why then, do we not have enough? When a gull landed near us on the granite slabs of Schoodic Point, Brooke faced the gull and read, Let me be in myself myself fully. Will you believe me when I say the Herring gull nodded? With all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plane; give me a soul beyond these…The sea thinks for me as I listen and ponder; the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer.
Brooke was no longer reading the words of Richard Jefferies. He embodied them.
Give me bodily life equal in fullness to the strength of earth, and sun, and sea; give me the soul-life of my desire. Once more I went down to the sea, touched it and said, farewell. So deep was the inhalation of this life that day, that it seemed to remain in me for years. This was a real pilgrimage.
This was our pilgrimage.
This was the grist of our marriage—to explore, to experiment, to experience life.
This is why I remain in love with Brooke. My clear, meandering Brooke.
He was face to face with the earth, with the sun, the night; face to face with himself. There was nothing between. No wall of written tradition. No built-up system of culture—his naked mind was confronted with naked earth.
My Maine journal reads:
Brooke lies naked on rock. Sunlight squinting. Blue water. Ocher rockweed. Tide rising. Perfect day.
The world says no to this kind of living every day. We are told it is self-indulgent, naïve, a waste of time, and especially heartbreaking to me, “silly.” We are told this kind of life belongs to the privileged. But Richard Jefferies was anything but privileged. He was a poor ecstatic eccentric who could barely put food on his table, yet he was full. Every day of his young life, he was full—full of wonder, full of questions, full of empathy and concern for the state of the world he believed was intrinsically tied to the state of his soul. He cared about the working man, the laborer, the yeoman, the woman making bread, and the child who would eat it. And he wrote voraciously about the virtues of country living. When Richard Jefferies wrote, It is sweet on awaking in the early morn to listen to the small bird singing in the tree, he acknowledged this spring rite belongs to everyone. This is what we have forgotten. Earth gives of itself freely and asks nothing of us in return—save the return of our bodies, dust to dust.
But we have become so insular, so busy, and obsessed with a capitalistic work ethic to fuel our mindless consumption, we forego the blessing of birdsong. In the process of becoming civilized, we have become inhuman.
We believe we are exceptional. Richard Jefferies tells us, Genius is