The Lake District, though Chinese sensibilities

 

Sometimes, in the higgledy-piggledy chaos of charity shops overwhelmed with book donations from declutterers, I come across hidden gems. This wonderful travel book, The Silent Traveller in Lakeland, was in the 50p. box of old Ordnance Survey maps and tourist leaflets.

Author Chiang Yee, fleeing political turmoil in his native China, was exiled to England in 1933. He studied politics at the University of London, and wrote The Chinese Eye, a successful literary companion to the 1935-36 International Exhibition of Chinese Art at the Royal Academy, providing an entertaining insight into the ways in which his countrymen perceive works of art and nature.

In July 1935, weary of traffic, smog and crowded pavements in London, seeking solitude and homesick for the mountainous landscapes of central China, he set out for a two-week walking holiday of the Lake District.

The Silent Traveller in Lakeland is his daily account of encounters and observations in a much-loved English landscape: Wordsworth country, seen though Chinese eyes and interpreted with Chinese sensibilities. It is, though, much more that a travelogue. Separated from his own family, and craving inner peace at a time when Europe edged towards Fascism and the precipice of war (the Spanish Civil War has just broken out) he muses on the human folly of armed conflict.

Chiang Yee was a poet and skilled artist. Along the way he illustrated his account with spontaneous paintings using brush, ink and soft paper, water techniques that seem to suit the rainy Lakeland landscape, each accompanied by a poem written in exquisite Chinese calligraphy and translated in the text. They encapsulate what he describes as one of the fundamental distinctions between British and Chinese landscape painting; the former tactual representation, the latter a response to the artist’s inner emotions.

Chiang Lee struggled to find a buyer for his book in London and eventually his publisher only took it on a no-royalty basis. It sold out within a month and, after a rapid renegotiation of contracts, became a best-seller, running through six editions. It was republished posthumously, in this edition, by Mercat Press in 2004.

Chiang Yee’s literary and academic career flourished, with an international series of Silent Traveller titles. For many readers The Silent Traveller in Lakeland remains his masterpiece.

He emigrated to the United States in 1955, was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, then finally returned to his hometown of Jiujiang in China in 1975, where he died, aged 72, in 1977.

 

Decorated Capitals

I recently posted some pictures of embossed covers on old natural history books. Here are some more examples of Victorian or Edwardian book production - decorated capitals at the beginning of chapters. These came from some battered pages of a book of wild flowers, that was falling apart and had lost its covers, so I don't know the title, author or the date of publication. But they are delightful examples of decorated typography whose origins can be traced back to the highly decorated capitals in illuminated manuscripts and are an art form that is seldom seen in today's books.

On the Benefits of Exploring your own Backyard

I was recently sent a book to review that brought home to me the great benefit of wildlife blogging – the wonderful way in which it allows people to share their exploration of Nature in their own local patch in a collaborative, mutually supportive way.

The book, On Extinction: How we Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger, is a long and often lyrical meditation on how people lose contact with their natural environment and the effect of this on the way in which we humans exploit and often abuse the natural world.  You can read a recent review of the book, by Kathleen Jamie in the Guardian, here but in essence it begins with the author, a poet, working in an abandoned tin miner’s hut in Cornwall, lamenting how little she knows about the wild flowers that surround her and contemplating extinction and the way in which advancing technology and human exploitation of natural resources have led to the loss of livelihoods, cultures and species. Over the following 133 pages she travels to an Antarctic whaling station in South Georgia, to the Falklands, Whitby and Baffin Island and visits the Inuit on the Arctic tundra, witnessing for herself evidence of humans’ impact on animals, their environment and each others’ cultures, with – along the way - numerous digressions into history, culture, literature, politics and economics, explaining how all this came about.   In the final chapter having - quite literally - travelled to the ends of the Earth the author, drifting downstream in her canal boat towards Wicken fen in Cambridgeshire, finds at least partial personal salvation in learning to identify the plants and animals around her - and so reconnecting with the natural world. She has discovered a fundamental truth – that nothing engenders respect for nature, and alertness to forces that threaten it, more powerfully than being on first-name terms with the wild plants and animals with which we share our local patch of the planet on an everyday basis. When they are part of the fabric of a person’s life, then it’s well-nigh impossible not to care about them and be aware of changes.

Having read and learned from many hundreds of fellow nature bloggers’ posts over the last two and a half years, it seems to me that this is a conclusion that many have reached and, perhaps even more importantly, have conveyed to blog posters around the planet, sharing their personal explorations that often venture only a few miles from home.

The first picture I posted on my blog was of a spider’s web and here, 450 posts later, is another such, in celebration of the modern technology’s web that connects people who share and care about nature in their own backyard. 

Wonderful resource the web, isn’t it?

On Extinction: How we Became Estranged from Nature by Melanie Challenger is published by Granta. ISBN 978-1-84708-187-2. www.grantabooks.com