Saturday, June 28, 2025

A small note on literature

 Ronald Blythe observed that woods have one function in children’s literature: they’re places to get lost in.

We give children the idea that the forest is a dangerous place. We could suggest it is interesting.

I have seen this more than once: Kids get out of a car at a trailhead and run and yell and scream around the parking lot. When they get into the forest, they become quieter and less fidgety, stiller if not still.

The transformation is one of those astonishing things you see if you study natural history.

• Ronald Blythe’s essay “A Suffolk Wood” was collected in Field Work; Norwich: Black Dog Books, 2007, pp. 29-32.

at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

A 17th-century kind of book

 Henry Seidel Canby has me thinking about 17 th -century writers and the kinds of books they wrote. Sir Thomas Browne is a wonder to me, tho...

  • Alice Oswald's poem on battle
     An appropriate read for Memorial Day? How about Alice Oswald’s long poem  Memorial , which recounts how soldiers in the  Iliad  met their e...
  • Lang: 'Letters to Dead Authors'
      Andrew Lang, a Scottish polymath who lived from 1844 to 1912, wrote   Letters to Dead Authors . I like the idea of the book, rather than t...
  • The things you hear
      Some days you go into the woods and see all kinds of things. Some days you don’t. And then there are days when you don’t see but   hear . ...