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soul or anything resembling the human heart there is no heart in nature the universe jefferies brackets man must supply it heart that seems to be his peculiar position far more so than intelligence which is shared by so many other things canon the heart above all creeds and reasons jefferies burned life like a torch he was solar in nature and wanted to see a powerful heart energy ignite the human race we would then labour not for money and goods or for imaginary heavens after death but for the fulfilment of our souls desire here and now this dramatic change of heart would undoubtedly help bring about a better human life for those to come in future times if the soul were able to free itself from all the ideas of materialism and religion it would surely be satisfied only with the great unknown that is the beyond or the scheme this life this now is itself beyond since it is an idea outside my ideas birds on tree they are beyond day after day as he inches ever closer towards death jefferies grapples with the problems that he presented in the story of my heart in 1883 his mind has been nailed down to past ideas of materialism and superstitious religion he doesn t understand nature and the universe or why it seems empty of human ideas and sympathy and is there anything to pray for that is not a deity perhaps he has come up against the buddhist idea of the void but as yet is unable to see the other side of it which is the world of tangible things of suchness i don t want to pursue this idea now as i admit i don t fully grasp it however i feel that jefferies was moving into this territory and had his health recovered might have produced an even more remarkable book than the story of my heart this follow up work was clearly in mind when he was writing many of these later notes i am not able to provide any satisfactory conclusion to this post but i do feel that in the two final quotes above jefferies is expressing some fresh and powerful perceptions again demonstrating the originality of his thought despite the intense difficulties with which he was afflicted posted on september 8 2019 by dr rebecca welshman posted in uncategorized 11 comments jefferies socialism and climate change rebecca welshman ending climate change requires the end of capitalism wrote phil mcduff in the guardian who then went on to mention 1 sixteen year old greta thunberg who has given a new urgent voice to the climate crisis for decades climate change scientists environmentalists and thousands of others have been saying similar things but have been ignored and sidelined or dismissed as paranoid hippies or scaremongers thunberg s speeches are to many of us like raindrops falling on parched land it s almost too late but there is still a chance that something can be done thunberg has been picked up by the media and been given a platform for this to happen something must have shifted perhaps this is the beginning of a new phase of climate change politics we are not used to hearing the words the system must change or reading that capitalism could and should come to an end thunberg began as a lone voice and many more joined her jefferies was a lone voice too he foresaw the need for the death of capitalism and this hope was embodied in an iconic image in his novel after london 1885 when felix s quest brings him to the ruined poisoned city of london he stumbles upon skeletons and blackened heaps of useless money these skeletons were the miserable relics of men who had ventured in search of ancient treasures into the deadly marshes over the site of the mightiest city of former days the deserted and utterly extinct city of london was under his feet after london or wild england the detestable creed that time is money the endless spinning of economic wheels that was only going to result in the exploitation of natural resources and eventually the demise of society itself was a theme of his work in the 1870s and 1880s a more meaningful existence something other than oiling the greedy wheels of capitalism was surely the right of everyone born into the world how did jefferies manage to get these ideas into print in late victorian england he donned the uniform of nature writer and nature journalist which gave him an acceptable and at the time innovative role in the media his printed natural history works always contained elements of mystical longing and awakening even as early as 1875 in the pall mall gazette in his article the commonest thing in the world he walks the wiltshire downs picks up a flint and imagines what wonders the stone has been witness to but as his career developed he no longer held back his views or his radical hopes for change some of his greatest works are pieces of prose that seemingly describe a rural scene walks in the wheatfields for instance but are laced with a sharp critique of social and economic systems st guido is another example a golden haired boy wandering the fields musing on what he finds talking to the wheat the brook and the birds the ethic of the piece cannot be missed and is well demonstrated here in the speech given to guido by the wheat the flowers go and the swallows go the old old oaks go and that oak will go under the shade of which you are lying guido and if your people do not gather the flowers now and watch the swallows and listen to the blackbirds whistling as you are listening now while i talk then guido my love they will never pick any flowers nor hear any birds songs they think they will they think that when they have toiled and worked a long time almost all their lives then they will come to the flowers and the birds and be joyful in the sunshine but no it will not be so for then they will be old themselves and their ears dull and their eyes dim so that the birds will sound a great distance off and the flowers will not seem bright of course we know that the greatest part of your people cannot help themselves and must labour on like the reapers till their ears are full of the dust of age that only makes us more sorrowful and anxious that things should be different i do not suppose we should think about them had we not been in man s hand so long that now we have got to feel with man every year makes it more pitiful because then there are more flowers gone and added to the vast numbers of those gone before and never gathered or looked at though they could have given so much pleasure and all the work and labour and thinking and reading and learning that your people do ends in nothing not even one flower we cannot understand why it should be so there are thousands of wheat ears in this field more than you would know how to write down with your pencil though you have learned your tables sir yet all of us thinking and talking cannot understand why it is when we consider how clever your people are and how they bring ploughs and steam engines and put up wires along the roads to tell you things when you are miles away and sometimes we are sown where we can hear the hum hum all day of the children learning in the school the butterflies flutter over us and the sun shines and the doves are very very happy at their nest but the children go on hum hum inside this house and learn learn so we suppose you must be very clever and yet you cannot manage this all your work is wasted and you labour in vain you dare not leave it a minute if you left it a minute it would all be gone it does not mount up and make a store so that all of you could sit by it and be happy directly you leave off you are hungry and thirsty and miserable like the beggars that tramp along the dusty road here all the thousand years of labour since this field was first ploughed have not stored up anything for you it would not matter about the work so much if you were only happy the bees work every year but they are happy the doves build a nest every year but they are very very happy we think it must be because you do not come out to us and be with us and think more as we do it is not because your people have not got plenty to eat and drink you have as much as the bees why just look at us look at the wheat that grows all over the world all the figures that were ever written in pencil could not tell how much it is such an immense quantity yet your people starve and die of hunger every now and then and we have seen the wretched beggars tramping along the road we have known of times when there was a great pile of us almost a hill piled up it was not in this country it was in another warmer country and yet no one dared to touch it they died at the bottom of the hill of wheat the earth is full of skeletons of people who have died of hunger they are dying now this minute in your big cities with nothing but stones all round them stone walls and stone streets not jolly stones like those you threw in the water dear hard unkind stones that make them cold and let them die while we are growing here millions of us in the sunshine with the butterflies floating over us this makes us unhappy i was very unhappy this morning till you came running over and played with us it is not because there is not enough it is because your people are so short sighted so jealous and selfish and so curiously infatuated with things that are not so good as your old toys which you have flung away and forgotten and you teach the children hum hum all day to care about such silly things and to work for them and to look to them as the object of their lives it is because you do not share us among you without price or difference because you do not share the great earth among you fairly without spite and jealousy and avarice because you will not agree you silly foolish people to let all the flowers wither for a thousand years while you keep each other at a distance instead of agreeing and sharing them is there something in you as there is poison in the nightshade you know it dear your papa told you not to touch it is there a sort of poison in your people that works them up into a hatred of one another why then do you not agree and have all things all the great earth can give you just as we have the sunshine and the rain how happy your people could be if they would only agree the independent labour party published a special edition of this essay in 1908 with an introduction by the m p j ramsay macdonald the first labour party politician to become a uk prime minister in 1883 jefferies socially challenging autobiography the story of my heart only narrowly went into print and never succeeded as a book during his lifetime but after his death became the most reprinted of all his books this extended essay written from the heart is an attack against capitalism through the lens of nature itself and through the vision of a beautifully sensitive and open mind he wished to make the world a better place for future generations hence the often quoted how pleasant it would be each day to think to day i have done something that will tend to make future generations more happy jefferies knew his friends would be in the future a sad little note to this effect can be found in his notebooks as if he knew that he was at that time already speaking to us jefferies may have spoken for the lone wanderer but he spoke for wider humanity too after his death at age 38 from tuberculosis his heroic effort to reach people to try to make a change for the better was recognised in justice the weekly newspaper of the social democratic federation in an article titled the irony of individualism published on 1 st october 1887 the magazine laments the lack of opportunities afforded by society to men and only men of the time in spain as in other countries write richard ford in his famous handbook the fate of the man of letters is hard when living his countrymen refuse him bread when dead they vouchsafe him a stone richard jefferies the most charming writer on rural matters of our own or perhaps of any generation died of overwork and poverty his public was too small to secure him a livelihood or to allow him to make provision for his children he dies and happily the government grants 100 a year to his wife but how many men of genius who might delight mankind by their works are even now being crushed out by overwork without ever having had an outlet for their faculties our anarchical competitive society stunts the individual wears him out with overwork and uncertainty and deprives humanity of the educated intelligence of her noblest sons from jefferies perspective it must have been an incredibly lonely and difficult vocation a radical thinker writing against a tide of late nineteenth century inequality stale dogma and poverty let s not forget then that the actions and words of a single person can and do make a difference we all need hope but as greta thunberg said recently once we start to act hope is everywhere 1 https www theguardian com commentisfree 2019 mar 18 ending climate change end capitalism posted on august 10 2019 by dr rebecca welshman posted in uncategorized 1 comment the grooved valley simon coleman the south downs https www telegraph co uk travel destinations europe united kingdom england east sussex south downs articles the south downs pub walks the following passage from richard jefferies autobiography the story of my heart provides a perfect example of how a particular landscape can induce a calm and creative state of mind the landscape in this case is chalk downland where sharp valleys can suddenly cut into wide stretches of smooth rolling surfaces i feel that the sides of the narrow valley help to shut out the everyday concerns of his life the memories and personal perspectives allowing a concentration of mind on the blue sky the earth time and the power of the sun his life is no longer personal he is part of all that there is and belongs to all that there is sometimes i went to a deep narrow valley in the hills silent and solitary the sky crossed from side to side like a roof supported on two walls of green sparrows chirped in the wheat at the verge above their calls falling like the twittering of swallows from the air there was no other sound the short grass was dried grey as it grew by the heat the sun hung over the narrow vale as if it had been put there by hand burning burning the sun glowed on the sward at the foot of the slope where these thoughts burned into me how many many years how many cycles of years how many bundles of cycles of years had the sun glowed down thus on that hollow since it was formed how long since it was worn and shaped groove like in the flanks of the hills by mighty forces which had ebbed alone with the sun which glowed on the work when it was done i saw back through space to the old time of tree ferns of the lizard flying through the air the lizard dragon wallowing in sea foam the mountainous creatures twice elephantine feeding on land all the crooked sequence of life the dragon fly which passed me traced a continuous descent from the fly marked on stone in those days the immense time lifted me lik...