The Story of My Heart. Richard Jefferies
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RICHARD JEFFERIES
In an enchanting used bookstore in Stonington, Maine, Brooke and Terry Tempest Williams came across a rare copy of The Story of My Heart, an autobiography by nineteenth-century British nature writer Richard Jefferies. Considered a nature mystic by his contemporaries, Jefferies developed his understanding of “a soul-life” while wandering the wild countryside of Wiltshire, England. Brooke and Terry, like John Fowles, Henry Miller, and Rachel Carson before, were inspired by the prescient words of this little-known writer, who describes ineffable feelings of being at one with nature. In a foreword and responses set alongside Jefferies’ writing, the Williams share their personal pilgrimage to Wiltshire to understand this man of “cosmic consciousness.” Their exploration of Jefferies deepens their own relationship while illuminating dilemmas of modernity, the intrinsic need for wildness, and what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.
First Torrey House Press Edition, November 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.
Published by Torrey House Press, LLC
Salt Lake City, Utah
e-Book ISBN: 978-1-937226-42-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014939595
Cover design by Rick Whipple, Sky Island Studio
Interior design by Jeff Fuller, Shelfish • Shelfish.weebly.com
Excerpts from essays published in Ecopsychology, June, 2014 (pp 122-123); and “The Colorado Archetypal River” published in Desert Water, University of Utah Press, 2014, appeared in endnotes in slightly different form.
Dedicated to Kathryn Blackett Tempest
How willingly I would strew the path of all with flowers; how beautiful a delight to make the world joyous!
The song should never remain silent, the dance never still, the laugh should sound like water which runs forever.
How pleasant it would be each day to think To-day
I have done something that will render future generations more happy.
I will search the world for beauty.
RICHARD JEFFERIES
The Story of My Heart, 1883
CONTENTS
Chapter III
MYSTIC
Chapter IV
POWER
Chapter V
PILGRIM
Chapter VI
IDLENESS
Chapter VII
WANDERING
Chapter VIII
EVOLUTION
Chapter IX
IMMORTALITY
Chapter X
CHAINS
Chapter XI
STARS
Chapter XII
LEAP
Afterword
NATURAL PRAYERS
THE STORY OF MY HEART
Terry Tempest Williams
THE BOOK
The story of my heart is complicated. I suspect this is true for all of us. So when I found a small brown book with this title embossed in gold, I immediately picked it up and began reading the first page.
My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge. It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances. A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees the mind is enclosed in a husk.
Who was this author and when was it published? I flipped back to the title page: Richard Jefferies, 1883. England. I had never heard of him. I continued reading:
With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean—in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written—with these I prayed, as if they were the keys of an instrument…I swelled forth the notes of my soul, redoubling my own voice by their power…
Here was a writer akin to Whitman, to Emerson, to Margaret Fuller and Thoreau. I recognized my own hunger in his desire to describe the ineffable. I also recognized how words fail us when trying to write about nature and in Jefferies’ words, “the soul-life” that he was so desperate to convey.
My eyes have no fidelity on the page. They wander at will. If bored, they stop, but as I continued reading sentence after sentence, Touching the crumble of earth, the blade of grass…thinking of the sea… I was rapt, my eyes in sympathy with each florid page. Jefferies had my attention. Word after word, I kept following him while standing in a musty, used bookshop in Stonington, Maine.
Brooke was restless, ready to go, and found me in the corner with Richard Jefferies.
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