The Tree is a sprawling text exploring Fowles’s thoughts on huamnkind’s relationship to nature. The early part of the narrative contrasts Fowles’s affection for untamed spaces with his father’s nigh-Linnaean orchard, but it was the last third of the book that really brought it home for me. His final chapter is pure pleasure, hinting at something vast and wonderful. The text also highlights the absolute best of Fowles’s prodigious vocabulary (tor, wisht, tachist, clitter, Laocoön, polypodies, bulbul, brassards, fumitory, and lucubration, to name a few), while ranging across natural history, personal narrative, and scientific musing.

spending a summer in nyc has made me miss trees and nature a lot :(

Beyond the meditation on the relationship between humans and nature, there are also tidbits of wisdom on mindfulness and being present.

I feel that I can learn from a lot of the ideas in this essay... it comments on the idea that people are constantly looking for purpose in everything external to us and everything we do. Fowles suggests that there is value in being lost and having no plan.

some quotes

(in response to putting nature under a microscope) “Naming things is always implicitly categorizing and therefore collecting them, attempting to own them.”

“There is a constant need, or consumption, to seek new objects and names, in the context of nature, new species, and experiences. Everyday ones grow mute with familiarity, so known they become unknown.” I’m definitely guilty of this in my daily life because I’m easily bored and always seeking things that are new and different. This passage is a reminder that there is still value in places I’ve been to before and experiences I’ve had previously.

Trees are here made into a symbol, and championed for their influence on art.

Near the end the author describes a very old stand of trees on Dartmoor, and I'd like to visit them.

Amo cuando un libro te sorprende con su profundidad y temas. Creí que iba a leer un ensayo bonito sobre por qué los árboles y la naturaleza son agradables. En realidad, me encontré con una reflexión por parte del autor sobre su papá, y un tratado sobre la relación occidental entre la humanidad y el conocimiento de las cosas. Podría decirse que es un texto filosófico bello sin ataduras, que crece de forma tan caótica como los mismos bosques que el autor adora tanto. Nada más no le puse cinco estrellas porque me pareció que la descripción en la parte final del texto no tenía las cualidades de lo que él tanto alegaba sobre cómo debíamos aproximarnos a nuestro entorno.

I *should* have liked this book but I made the mistake of reading it almost immediately after reading American Eden by Victoria Johnson, a book about David Hosack and botany in the early United States. That book left me with something of a reverence for the work of botanists, which Fowles seemed to try to trash very early on in this book. So I think I missed his point, and I found it hard to focus on a lot of what he was saying in The Tree. I think wilderness is incredibly important, I agree that nature, art, and creativity are definitely linked (especially for me personally), and I find none of that incompatible with the desire to know the names for things. But then, I am also a linguist. Perhaps I'll return to this at a later and more opportune time, but for now it's really turned me off Fowles.

A John Fowles le gustan los árboles. Mucho. Muchísimo. Lo flipa con ellos. Pero no los árboles en cuanto a entes individuales, con su nombre en latín y su clasificación en una familia, orden y clase.

No.

A John Fowles le gustan los árboles en cuanto a parte de un bosque, parte de un ecosistema en perpetua simbiósis, parte de la Naturaleza.

Porque para él, un gran mal de la sociedad es la "cientificación" de la naturaleza, la necesidad de etiquetarlo todo, con la presunción de que así lo entenderemos todo. Y ello lo une a la necesidad del hombre de etiquetar y racionalizar el Arte. Para Fowles, Arte y Naturaleza no sólo se parecen, son la misma cosa. Son ambos parte de nosotros y contienen algo indescriptible y que jamás podremos definir.

Y así, Fowles escribe un ensayo corto sobre la Naturaleza, el Arte, y su visión de ambos. Y pese a ser corto y tratar de un tema que en principio no me llamaba la atención, tengo que decir que me ha ganado. Se puede estar de acuerdo o no, pero lo que es innegable es de que se trata de un libro con ideas interesantes, que te hacen pensar. Y hay innumerables libros que no consiguen eso.

Me costó mucho entrar, y creo que no del todo por mi propia torpeza, pero al final es que a este señor le gustan mucho los árboles y perderse en el bosque y está bien eso.