A Temple of Living Pillars: John Fowles' Ode to the Sacred and Sensuous Tree

“I am certain all sacred buildings, from the greatest cathedral to the smallest chapel, and in all religions, derive from the natural aura of certain woodland or forest settings.”

– John Fowles
Tweet

In his book of notes and sketches written while wandering through forests and among the trees, Herman Hesse wrote, “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers,” while Walt Whitman noted the ways in which people fall “into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d extatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them.” Likewise author John Fowles dedicated an essay to the ways in which trees and forests formed the bedrock of his own creative, psychic and religious sensibility. This essay is published as a short and charming book that surveys Fowles’ relationship with nature: from the influence of his father’s aspirations to keep an orchard, to his own draw to the more wild and uncontrolled, dwindling British wilderness.

I SEE NOW THAT what I liked best about the green density, the unpeopled secrecy of the Devon countryside that the chances of history gave me was its explorability. At the time I thought I was learning to shoot and fish (also to trespass and poach, I am afraid) to botanize and bird-watch; but I was really addicting myself, and beyond curability, to the pleasures of discovery, and in particular of isolated discovery and experience. The lonelier the place, the better it pleased me: its silence, its aura, its peculiar conformation, its enclosedness. I had a dream of some endless combe, I suppose almost an animal dream, an otter-dream, of endless hanging beech-woods and hazel-coppices and leated meadows, houseless and manless. It was not quite without substance in those days, such ‘lost’ valleys still existed and in some of them the rest of the world did not. But of course they were finite, and at some point ended at a lane, a cottage or farm-house, ‘civilization’; and discovery died.

The cost of all this is that I have never gained any taste for what lies beyond the experience of solitary discovery–in terms of true geographical exploration, for the proper exploitation of the discovery. I have dabbled in many branches of natural (and human) history, and have a sound knowledge of none; and the same goes for countless other things besides. I like a kind of wandering wood acquaintance, and no more; a dilettante’s, not a virtuoso’s; always the green chaos rather than the printed map. I have method in nothing, and powers of concentration, of patience in acquiring true specialized knowledge, that would disgrace a child. I can concentrate when I write, but purely because it is a sublimated form of discovery, isolated exploration, my endless combe in leaves of paper. I place all this entirely upon the original adolescent experience, for I do not think I was born so, with a painfully low threshold of boredom before learning or knowledge that is not clearly assimilable to the experience of solitary discovery.

“In a way woods are like the sea, sensorially far too various and immense for anything but surfaces or glimpses to be captured.”

Perhaps because I was brought up without any orthodox faith, and remain without it, there was also, I suspect, some religious element in my feeling towards woods. Their mysterious atmospheres, their silences, the parallels— especially in beechwoods—with columned naves that Baudelaire seized on in his famous line about a temple of living pillars, all these must recall the man-made holy place. We know that the very first holy places in Neolithic times, long before Stonehenge (which is only a petrified copse), were artificial wooden groves made of felled, transported and re-erected tree trunks; and that their roofs must have seemed to their makers less roofs than artificial leaf-canopies. Even the smallest woods have their secrets and secret places, their unmarked precincts, and I am certain all sacred buildings, from the greatest cathedral to the smallest chapel, and in all religions, derive from the natural aura of certain woodland or forest settings. In them we stand among older, larger and infinitely other beings, remoter from us than the most bizarre other non-human forms of life: blind, immobile, speechless (or speaking only Baudelaire’s confuses paroles), waiting… altogether very like the only form a universal god could conceivably take. The Neolithic peoples, the slaves, as we are of an industrial economy, of their own great new cultural ‘invention’ of farming, were the first great deforesters of our landscapes, and perhaps it was guilt that made them return to the trees to find a model for their religious buildings—in which they were followed by the Bronze Age, the Greeks and Romans with their columns and porticoes, the Celtic Iron Age with its Druids and sacred oak-groves.

There is certainly something erotic in them, as there is in all places that isolate and hide; but woods are in any case highly sensuous things. They may not carry more species than some other environments, but they are far richer and more dramatic in sensory impressions. Nowhere are the two great contemporary modes of reproducing reality, the word and the camera, more at a loss; less able to capture the sound (or soundlessness) and the scents, the temperatures and moods, the all-roundness, the different levels of being in the vertical ascent from ground to tree-top, in the range of different forms of life and the subtlety of their inter-relationships. In a way woods are like the sea, sensorially far too various and immense for anything but surfaces or glimpses to be captured. They defeat view-finder, drawing-paper, canvas, they cannot be framed; and words are as futile, hopelessly too laborious and used to capture the reality.