The Hammock Papers: Roam.

18 September 2024

Roam.

Reading was not so important to my working-class community, unless it was the Bible. Reading the Bible means that you can read anything else -- and it makes Shakespeare easy because the language of the King James version is also the language of Shakespeare. We had a strong oral tradition in the north of England, and people often forget that not being able to read, or not reading, even fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago, was very different from not reading now.

We live in a 24/7 saturation bombing from enervated mass media and a bogus manufactured popular culture. If you don't read you will likely be watching telly, or on the computer, or listening to fake music from puppet-show bands.

When the families I knew in my northern textile town didn't read -- and they didn't -- they were in the brass band, or in the choir, telling their own stories down the pub or on the greyhound track, finding the quiet pleasure of mending kit or working the allotment, or walking for miles in the Pennines. I am not glamorising this working-class life; it was hard and short, and I could not stay there and I would not want it back. But it had a genuine culture of its own -- roots up --and it was not force-fed adverts, consumerism and The X Factor.

The Living Mountain is the need to be physical, to be in the body, and to let the senses and the soul work in harmony with the mind. This seems a long way from lying in bed and reading a book. But it isn't far at all.

Reading stills the body for a while, allowing rest without torpor and quiet without passivity. Reading is not a passive act. Engaged in the book, in company with the writer, the mind can roam where it will. Such freedom to roam reminds us that body and mind need exercise and activity, and that neither the mind nor the body can cope with confinement. And if the body has to cope with confinement, then all the more reason to have developed a mind that knows how to roam.

Jeanette Winterson, from "A Bed. A Book. A Mountain.," the afterward to Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL