Intro & Preface & Contents
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How many more springs can I hope to see? A sanguine temper would say ten or twelve; let me dare to hope humbly for five or six. That is a great many. Five or six spring-times, welcomed joyously, lovingly watched from the first celandine to the budding of the rose; who shall dare to call it a stinted boon? Five or six times the miracle of earth reclad, the vision of splendour and loveliness which tongue has never yet described, set before my gazing. To think of it is to fear that I ask too much.
Alpha.
And so he did -- ask for too much -- as Gissing was dead within a year of finishing this book. But how rare it is to truly appreciate the turn of the seasons as Ryecroft does here. When I think of the people in literature who have been in a position to do this, I don’t come up with many examples. Austen’s heroines were doomed to study the seasons, as strolling about the countryside was one of their chief occupations, in their otherwise constricted lives. Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek is an excellent modern example, but her situation was very unusual. Wendell Berry is a farmer and poet so is all but required to note such things.
Mostly this makes me think of Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain -- my obsession. There, as here, the careful observation of flowers and trees is used to emphasize the passage of seasons and of time. Hans, a young engineer-to-be from Hamburg, discovers the wonders of nature in the Swiss Alps as part of his "Taking Stock" as he lives the life of a well-off tuberculosis patient. Like Henry, he studies botany books and even collects samples to preserve and study. More, this study is a part of his scientific-humanistic life, which balances his mystical-spiritual life, and so is part of the dialectic he represents.
On rare occasions I will buy a few flowers from a corner stand. But I then keep the flowers for months as I find their dried out form (sometimes) as appealing as their original form. Not sure what either Mann or Gissing would make of this.
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