AFTER a week of deluges the days are brightened with a yellow sun and at night the stars glitter in a clear sky.
Walking home late, my breath makes clouds in the frosty air. Streets and pavement are white and, on the verges, the montbretia which, in August, flowered more orange than the setting sun, is now a skeleton of drooping leaves, stiff and sparkling.
Wall tops are frosted as if sprinkled with snow and the frosted briar leaves catch the moonlight. Lawns are glittering plains upon which small fires flash and die. Jack Frost tightens his iron grip on nature and transforms it. The dead beech leaves which, in the wet weeks just past, lay dark and decaying are changed to a silver, deep-pile carpet spread across the pavement, crunchy underfoot. It is a fairytale world, all silent and shining, the village all a-bed and not a leaf stirring or a soul abroad but myself.
On the bay the water is smooth as a lake, dark and motionless as the face of a mirror; it reflects the pier-head light and the lights of the village. Now and then they shiver on the surface, broken by a fish or a bird; further offshore, the lights of the marker-buoys wink on and off every minute or so. For the last week, it has been raining; a few weeks before that we had heavy snow. Now, we have dry, frosty weather. As the songs says, "What a wonderful world!" Change is, I think, the dream-topping of life, provided it is pleasant change. A holiday is a "break", a new place is a "tonic". So it was when we were young, when something new, fascinating or exciting waited around every corner. I recall my children asking, when we travelled to a new place, "When will we get there, Dad, what will it be like?"
The old cliché is that "In Ireland, we get little climate but much weather. " May we thank the gods for that. How dull it would be to live where the only change is from rain to drought, cold to heat, a climate of extremes with no subtlety. In Ireland, we are spoiled for ‘climatic subtlety’. We may call it ‘weather’.
As the evenings lengthen and the cock robins begin their tree-top arias, what a feast we have to look forward to! I may miss the rising sap for a month or two but will enjoy it in our old haven of La Gomera, in the Canary Islands. I could do with a change and a rest.
Last year brought unexpected bounty; I was offered three book ‘deals’ and haven’t had a minute to do anything but walk locally, observe nature in my garden and write, write, write.
One book is already in the shops, Dope in the Age of Innocence, a memoir of the early 1960s, when we believed that psychedelic drugs could expand the mind as Aldous Huxley and others had speculated. Our aspiration was to enhance our understanding, not wreck our heads. However, each generation has its own lights or darknesses to follow. Those who have read Dope in the Age of Innocence have allowed me the dispensation of time, and been generous in their understanding. And they say they have enjoyed reading about the wild, madcap adventure that it all was then.
Now, in going to La Gomera, the object is to complete a book about the 20 years we have spent in west Cork, a sequel to my 2003 book, A Place Near Heaven. During that time, composing this weekly column has been an abiding pleasure. I will continue to write my column from Gomera, as often before, encouraged by my readers who say they enjoy news from a foreign shore.
Money-lust did not get the same grip in La Gomera; there was no Banana Tiger. Meanwhile, everywhere, it is the striving for perfection in whatever we do that remains our salvation. Our innate aspiration to create, in Yeats’ metaphor "A poem as cold and lovely as the dawn" survives; it is the enduring engine of the human spirit. The "poem" is evident in Newgrange, in the keen edge of a plough, in the geometrical perfection of a ploughed field. It is when this instinct is subverted to base greed that the world around us becomes rotten. However, this world’s abiding constant is change.
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, January 24, 2011
