The Tree

by John Fowles

trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times: here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous—never plodding, mechanical, inescapably monotonous.

Ordinary experience, from waking second to second, is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science’s powers to analyse. It is quintessentially ‘wild’, in the sense my father disliked so much: unphilosophical, irrational, uncontrollable, incalculable. In fact it corresponds very closely—despite our endless efforts to ‘garden’, to invent disciplining social and intellectual systems—with wild nature. Almost all the richness of our personal existence derives from this synthetic and eternally present ‘confused’ consciousness of both internal and external reality, and not least because we know it is beyond the analytical, or destructive, capacity of science.

I do not believe nature is to be reached that way either, by turning it into a therapy, a free clinic for admirers of their own sensitivity. The subtlest of our alienations from it, the most difficult to comprehend, is our need to use it in some way, to derive some personal yield. We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves), and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability—however innocent and harmless the use. For it is the general uselessness of so much of nature that lies at the root of our ancient hostility and indifference to it.

The modern version of hell is purposelessness.