How the Heather Looks Quotes

“I suppose that an American's approach to English literature must always be oblique. We share a language but not a landscape. In order to understand the English classics as adults, we must build up a sort of visual vocabulary from the books we read as children.... I contend that a child brought up on the nursery rhymes and Jacobs' English Fairy Tales can better understand Shakespeare; that a child who has pored over Beatrix Potter can better respond to Wordsworth. Of course it is best if one can find for himself a bank where the wild thyme grows, or discover daffodils growing wild. Failing that, the American child must feed the "inward eye" with the images in the books he reads when young so that he can enter a larger realm when he is older. I am sure I enjoyed the Bronte novels more for having read The Secret Garden first. As I stood on those moors, looking out over that wind-swept landscape I realized that it was Mrs. Burnett who taught me what "wuthering" meant long before I ever got around to reading Wuthering Heights. Epiphany comes at the moment of recognition.”
― Joan Bodger, How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books

“-Would-be Pilgrims have sometimes asked me, anxiously, whether they can make the same journey. Will it be the same? Is there anything left? They remind me of children to whom I am about to tell a story. 'Is it true?' they ask. My stock reply is, "It is truer than true." Often there is one child, determined not to be impressed, who says scornfully, "I've already heard that story." I am immediately interested. "You have? So have I. But since the last time I told it, and since the last time you heard it, the earth's gone 'round the sun, the rain's fallen into the brook, and the brook's run into the river. Even if you've heard this story before, even if I tell it word for word just like the first time, you've changed and I've changed and the story will change."
You can never step into the same river twice.”
― Joan Bodger, How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books

“Now I see more clearly how a truth, too big to be expressed except in art or poetry, can hitch itself to a landscape. The process of attachment engenders another dimension to the idea, enlarges it, and makes it visible through time as myth incarnate (if you consider the planet as a living being). The myth may fade, the place may lose significance, but like the sleeping hero, like a recumbent goddess, the truth will remain. When the time is right it will reemerge to support what needs to be expressed. Then the landscape will be rediscovered, the story told again, the truth revealed for a new age.”
― Joan Bodger, How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books