For the past two years, my favorite books have been about pre-industrial life in the country, mostly England, Spain, Japan and France in that order. This was another book about life in those times and although it is fiction gives me a little more feeling as to what those times must have been like.
Here are my highlights and notes:
Most country people had a deep-rooted disinclination to sleep away from home and a belief that, like as not, to sojourn amongst strangers was to fall among thieves. It was the way they always had lived and, like their forefathers, they traveled no further than a horse or their own legs could carry them there and back in a day.
I continue to find it fascinating that most people, from the dawn of agrarian society up to the invention of the automobile rarely traveled very far from their villages. If they did, then I imagine it was usually forced upon them in things such as war, famine and so on.
From recent archeological discoveries it appears that there were vast trade links, especially where there were waterways in pre-Roman times. But aside from armies, merchants and vast movements due to threats, I’d think that staying around the village must have been the norm for hundreds of years.
As I thought about this I wondered if villagers post-Roman empire would have even known who built those magnificent roads, aqueducts, temples, fortifications and so on. AI tells me that most would have known little other than there was a great, ancient civilization as evidenced by those structures. There was an empire, it went away, and you get along with life without thinking much about that pile of stones in your village.
I’m fascinated when I think of those first humans who traveled into the America land mass and over the centuries formed distinct tribes with unique languages. Those natives, while they did travel, didn’t go very far by today’s standards and would have had to walk until the Spanish brought horses.
Anyway, this fascination comes to mind when I read that paragraph.
There was this weather, this landscape, thick woods, roadsides deep in grass and wild flowers. And to south and north of the Vale, low hills, frontiers of a mysterious country.
A beautiful setting. I’ve been reminded however, that although we romanticize those times, they must have been very tough. We forget they wouldn’t have had modern conveniences such as a working indoor toilet. If you had to relieve yourself in the middle of winter then outside you went. They wouldn’t have bathed much, no brushing of teeth and most would have worked the land coming home drenched in sweat day after day. We watch TV shows about these times where everyone is very clean but that couldn’t have been the case. I don’t think any of us in modern times would be up to the back breaking work those people would have seen as normal.
I thought that there might be something to be said for seasons in hell because, when we’d dragged ourselves back from the bloodiness, life had seemed brighter than we’d remembered it. We sloughed off the pals who’d gone down into death. While it was day that is. At night, in the dark, for a time they came back but we wanted no part of what they now were: theirs was another world—hell, if you care to call it that.
A chilling passage. The protagonist in this book had just come back from World War I, a true hellscape. I believe in ghosts/spirits and with so many being created daily I don’t doubt there must be some very chilling tales.
Am I making too much of this? Perhaps. But there are times when man and earth are one, when the pulse of living beats strong, when life is brimming with promise and the future stretches confidently ahead like that road to the hills. Well, I was young . .
That last sentence is key, being young. I remember the excitement of being young, when the world was open to you and much was left to be discovered. I’ve not felt that type of excitement in one, maybe two decades and I miss it.
Ah, those days . . . for many years afterwards their happiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young. If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.
Perfectly said. Again, he brings forth the excitement of being young set in a beautiful countryside scene. I did not grow up in the country but remember being outside on warm summer nights, trying to catch fireflies which is a rarity these days thanks to all the chemicals with which we’ve saturated the land. A warm summer night as a young boy were the happiest. Another image I have is simply riding my skateboard down the street in the dusk after a long day of play outside. The wind was in my hair, the sound of the wheels rolling along the pavement and probably looking forward to a few late night video games in my room as, being summer, I’d have more fun the following day. It was all so magical.
The author is correct: people move away, grow older, die and the belief there will be another marvelous thing around the corner fades. I’m at the point of life where I look back to the past much more than I look forward. Many friends have moved, we’ve all grown older but thankfully I’m not at the point yet where many have died, although there have been a few.
Even when they visit their church in large numbers, at Harvest Thanksgiving or the Christmas Midnight Mass, it is no more than a pagan salute to the passing seasons.
Love it. The Catholic Church simply moved in and while suppressing some pagan customs, mostly adopted them. They saw it simply wouldn’t work trying to erase local traditions so simply incorporated them by changing the name to some Saint’s feast or whatever. Samhain becomes “All Saint’s Day” and eventually Halloween. The Celtic pagan feast Lughnasadh becomes Lammas Day.
*Note: I wonder if the Lammas, meaning “Loaf Mass” as in bread is where the JRR Tolkein got the idea for Lembas bread, from the elves in Lord of the Rings?
What came over me? A sort of madness I suppose, because I gripped that knob more firmly and dragged at it again and again so that the bell’s sound came hurrying along corridors, round corners, down staircases, echoing and re-echoing, spreading through the dark and empty house like ripples of her laughter. But now I knew that it was laughter calling to me from the past—clearly, playfully, yet poignantly sad. It was the worst moment of my life.
A beautiful visual representing missed opportunity.
We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
Time marches on and everything changes.
