About the forest

The forest, my forest, is the Forêt de Soignes on the outskirts of Brussels. Forest may seem a grand word for a largish area of managed woodland, but though it is smaller than nearby grander forests in the Ardennes, it is certainly much bigger than most woods in England and as such worthy of the title “forest”.
When at home in Brussels, I go into the forest at least twice a week. We live close to the Bois de la Cambre, which is actually the part of the forest that advances into the city and was tamed into parkland in the 19th century. The forest proper starts straight after it, so it takes me less than 15 minutes to get into it on my bike. If it’s for a walk, the nearest convenient entry point at the Enfants Noyés is only ten minutes by car.
The forest is criss-crossed by a network of drives, ways and paths - "drèves, chemins, sentiers". My favourite word is "drève" borrowed from the Flemish, literally a drive, a straight track driven through the forest and therefore tree-lined (the most spectacular is the very long and grand avenue of beeches in the arboretum). The "chemins" are more winding. I have a copy of an 18th century map and most of them are on it already. These days signs tell visitors which tracks can be used by walkers, cyclists and horse-riders and while most are shared, some are dedicated, giving each community an opportunity to do its own thing unimpeded by the others. Recently the infrastructure has become very well maintained and regularly repaired. The advantage of woodland as a recreational area is that the trees hide the people, so unlike wide open spaces such as beaches which can soon appear to be busy, you frequently have the impression you have the place to yourself. Some days, like today, midweek on a cold grey January day, you actually do pretty well have it to yourself, which is remarkable at half an hour’s cycling from home in the city.
The forest is predominantly beech, interspersed with oak and birch, and with pockets of pine, fir and larch. The beeches are tall and slender, so they let through plenty of light. The forest is not a dark and dank place. The subsoil is very hard which suits the beech as it has a shallow root system - and for that reason is prone to blowing over in a gale (there are always wind-blown trees waiting for foresters to remove them - is that what a back-log is?). There is not much undergrowth, though some areas have been heavily colonized by brambles. It’s quite easy when you’re walking to strike off the path and really be in the heart of the forest, feeling and hearing the dead leaves underfoot. This is when you’re most likely to spot a deer. There are not many, they tend to be in groups of two to six but they soon get wind of you and scamper off, their white rears bobbing up and down until out of sight. You may find them in more or less the same place for several weeks in a row and then not see them for months. Otherwise, if you’re looking for wildlife you’ll have to settle for squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, mice and lots of birds, including some fine smaller birds of prey and owls.
There are a few small lakes in the forest and little clearings which make splendid spots for a picnic in the summer.
At the start of the autumn, we used to pick mushrooms in the forest, but that is not allowed anymore, so we have to go to the bigger and wilder forests of the Ardennes. Blackberries are still fair game though.
The forest is of course temperate and loses its leaves in winter. We hear a lot these days about the tropical rainforest, but there is actually more temperate forest in the world, which is not surprising if you look at the distribution of land mass on a globe. The temperate forest is perhaps even more important to us then as the lungs of the planet. The Forêt de Soignes is the lungs of Brussels. It’s the best place to go here for fresh air. Fortunately the temperate forest tends to be less under threat than the tropical, and actually growing in surface area. The Forêt de Soignes has certainly been managed sustainably for centuries. Sometimes you see the foresters marking out the trees to be felled and occasionally witness the earth shaking crash of one of the big old beeches coming down. They are incredibly tall, you don’t really appreciate it till you find one lying down and walk balancing along the trunk.
In the winter especially you see the skeleton of the forest and the dominant dimension is the vertical: the trunks form countless vertical lines drawing you eyes upwards again and again, literally uplifting. If there is a creator, you feel his presence. The columns of Greek temples started as stylised trees, crenelated for the bark, and with geometric foliage at the top. In the middle ages the cathedral architects, inventors of the gothic arch and vaults, added branches to the stone trunks. In the modern age, the cathedral representation of the forest is completed with even stone leaves in the vaulting of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, still under construction. Or you can just settle for the natural version in the forest. “La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers...” (Baudelaire).
There is after all something quite wonderful about trees: their elegant proportions; their exuberant putting forth of new growth in the spring, their lush greenery in the summer, their bright colours in the autumn, their fine tracery in the winter.; their size; their age. In the National Parks of the Western US, I was more moved by the majestic vastness of the sequoias than that of the canyons.
One of the best things about going regularly into the forest is that you notice the passing of the seasons, far more than in the city. The forest is beautiful in all seasons (and all weathers) and always has someting to offer.
The forest is where I recharge my batteries. The physical exercise of pedaling my bike or walking can overcome initial weariness and introduce new energy. Yet it is more than that - the fresh air, the calm, the presence of nature, the wonder of the seasons, all nourish the soul
“Und frische Nahrung, neues Blut
Saug ich aus freier Welt...” (Goethe)

About places

“There are places I’ll remember,
All my life, though some have changed,
Some forever, not for better,
Some have gone and some remain”

In a way this “About being here” is about being there. However, our present is infomed by our past. We are what we were; the sum total of our experience. Our experience is conditioned by place, time and circumstances. Place is a shorthand for this, but in a very temporal sense. Places are not eternal as we so often discover: the great places of our childhood which turn out to be much smaller when revisited; the special places of our adulthood which turn out to be quite ordinary. We can revisit the locations of our past, but we cannot actually revisit our past. Nor do we need to, the most important parts of our past we carry with us anyway, for better or for worse, in our present.
I’d like to write about a few places where I have lived.

Halifax:
I was born in Halifax. Halifax is an archetypal Northern England 19th century industrial town of stone-built terraces climbing up hillsides away from mill chimneys. Yorkshiremen used to pray to be saved from Hull, Hell and Halifax. I guess that’s why my parents got out of there as soon as possible. But my grandmother and aunt and uncle stayed. So Halifax was a place where we went to visit “family”. It was a good hour by car and clearly had the feeling of going to another world, an older and materially poorer one, from which we had miraculously escaped. It’s a long time since I’ve been back to Halifax.

Ilkley:
I grew up in Ilkley, in every way a well-to-do genteel Yorkshire town, nestling under the moors by the lovely river Wharfe.. However, since I went to secondary school in another town, I really don’t know anyone there apart from my parents. I still go to visit them twice a year, but they no longer live in the house in which I grew up, which further distances me from the place. Ilkley really is a “place” to me in a very impersonal way, familiar but strangely remote. The best thing about Ilkley is going for walks on the Moor or in nearby Wharfedale. There I can experience the English landscape that we English so fondly associate with our country, though it never was the actual backdrop of our experience of growing up English.

Bradford:
I went to secondary school in Bradford. So this was the place where I went out with classmates on Saturday evenings for underage drinking in pubs. I tried to find the Vaults Bar a few years ago; it has been demolished and there’s a car park there. I did find Tony Kingham at Bradford Grammar School though. He was one of my first French teachers. He started at BGS at the same time as I did as a schoolboy. He showed me over the place. A lot had changed, we reminisced together about characters who had occupied spaces now used for something else. Bradford is an even more down-at-heel city than in the ‘70s, grimy, formerly industrial, fallen on hard times. The shared aspiration of most of us at school was to get away from it. Thank God we did.

l’Isle-Jourdain:
L’Isle-Jourdain is a small village in the South West of France about 30 km from Toulouse. This is where I first lived by myself away from my parents. That was in itself a liberating experience, but it was compounded by the fact that the French countryside was a very different place to Yorkshire. There was a lot of good eating and copious drinking with endless conversation, all unshackled from the constraints of a middle-class boys-only English upbringing. I returned with a strong twangy SW French accent and numerous other affectations which seemed to go well with Bohemian student life. South West France was my first love affair with a place, and it continued through my student years with frequent stays culminating in a year in Toulouse. I don’t go back that way very often now, but when I do the way of life and accent come easily.

Oxford:
I went to university in Oxford, at Christ Church. I found it at first a somewhat intimidating place but with time it came to feel like home. I made some of my best friends at university; it was a stimulating and happy time, there was so much close to hand for the taking. Each generation of students makes up its own Oxford. So mine is gone, but the decor is unchanged. The architecture is wonderful, the stone warm, the centre bustling with people from both university and town. It’s a manageable size with always something going on and greenery never far away. If I had to live in England, I’d probably make it there - it was actually the last place I lived in England. Since my daughter studies there now, I go back regularly.

Kamen:
Kamen is a small town in North West Germany where the first two Autobahnen crossed each other; the Kamener-Kreuz still features on German traffic news. I ended up there in my year out during my modern languages degree. At the time it had the most easterly coal-mine of the Ruhr (since closed down), workers’ houses painted grey, its own Turkish ghetto and a non-descript modern shopping precinct. In short, post-war Germany in miniature. Once a man who had given me a lift in a big BMW said, “This is not real Germany, you should go to Bavaria”; but the point is, it was real Germany. The school I worked in was an “experimental” comprehensive. Teachers volunteered to work there, so its staff, my colleagues were very left-wing and “alternativ” - like many people in the Ruhr they were friendly and down to earth. Living there was an experience that educated me politically. Needless to say, I never go back there.

Brussels:
I came to Brussels in 1982, which means I have now lived here half of my life. It’s certainly the place I have lived longest. This is where I have made my home, raised my family and found a circle of friends and acquaintances. Brussels is a truly cosmopolitan city (even for Belgians it is officially bi-lingual) where you don’t feel out of place as a foreigner. Brussels is not the capital of a single language community: that falls to Paris for the French and Amsterdam for the Dutch speakers. But we can accept its claim to being the capital of Europe, at least administratively. Brussels has the advantages of a capital city with plenty to see and do, access to many different cultures, lots of entertainment, restaurants and shops, and easy links to other capitals. But it doesn’t have many of the disadvantages in that it’s not too large, you can get about it easily, you can get into places without booking weeks in advance, you can get out of it fast when you want to, to the forest and countryside, and on a reasonable salary you can still afford to live in the centre in a house with a garden. In short, if you don’t mind the weather (which I don’t, being English) Brussels has a lot going for it and over the years it has really grown on me. It’s important to recognize, wherever you are, when being here is good, and to realize that it’s pointless to aspire to being somewhere else. Brussels is home to me.

Monfalcone:
Monfalcone is a ship-building town in North East Italy where my wife was born and grew up. When she first took me there, over twenty years ago, I wasn’t impressed. Nearly every town in Italy has a wonderful beautiful historic centre. Monfalcone doesn’t, it’s not old enough. Admittedly they have improved it recently by getting rid of cars from certain streets and the main square and repainting some buildings. But it’s never going to be on the list of 100 must-see towns in Italy. In fact, it’s just typical small town Italy - which is what makes it good. Italy is such a pleasant place to live that most of its population don’t bother moving away from where they were born: just being here is fine with them. So Monfalcone is full of my wife’s family, friends and acquaintances. In fact, it’s just the opposite of Ilkley, which is picturesque but where I know nobody. Monfalcone is actually at the northernmost point of the Mediterranean, which for us from further north can’t be bad. The sea offers some excellent swimming. It also turns out that Monfalcone is only a short drive from the much under-rated Julian Alps. So, although not initially impressed, I now see its good points. We own a flat there, so I spend more time there in a year than in England.

These are most of the places I have lived, as opposed to merely visited. I shall write about some of those another time.
I think it emerges from my descriptions that the most important aspect of a place is the people who are there. At BGS Founders’ Day, they always quoted the Greek: “The men make the city not the walls”. Without the people places seem curiously hollow. We return to them sometimes only to find ghosts. It’s better to be here now.

About reading

I have written before in dialogue with blogger Asbo (on “diary-by-asbo”, a blog to which this one is inevitably indebted) that BEING is preferable to READING.
It may seem strange, therefore, to begin postings to “About being here” with “About reading”. However, in writing a blog, this present exercise is clearly about reading, so this will be our starting point.
Here is an extract from my dialogue with Asbo:`

“ABH: Ultimately reading is a poor substitute for living (as opposed to merely existing), but as there are times when real living is impossible, it is good to have the substitute.
ASBO: My entire readership has commented that reading is a kind of OK second-best to real life when real life is not possible.
ABH: Admittedly I was being a bit provocative last time. I seem to have spent a large part of my life reading and continue to do so. So why do we read? To approach it from the other side: why do we write? We write to set down our thoughts, ideas, experiences, emotions (or just to tell a good story) so we do not forget them, to give them form and maybe to share them with others. So when we come to read we share that and gain an insight into others. Our own experience and direct knowledge is inevitably limited by the time, place and circumstances in which we live. Reading extends and expands our experience, albeit vicariously. Inevitably not as vividly as the real thing, but in its infinite possibilities in a very enriching way. Sometimes, indeed, in a more enriching way than some of our repetitive daily routine.
ASBO: Isn't there a Sufi saying to the effect that a man whose intellect is stuffed with information, but whose being remains untouched by the reality of the truth is as a donkey carrying a large load of books?
ABH: The image of the donkey prompts me to elaborate on my earlier comments about reading being a second best.
The risk of spending too much time reading books (of becoming bookish) is that of not devoting enough time and attention to experiencing reality firsthand, that is gaining knowledge directly from living (preferably in full awareness). Indeed certain kinds of knowledge can only be gained firsthand, never from books. So the disadvantage of spending too much time reading is that of losing a direct vision of reality, thereby becoming like the donkey.
Similarly, the glut of information in the much vaunted "information society" can stand in the way of greater wisdom. We run the risk of becoming donkeys overburdened with facts and indiscriminate opinions but without any organizing perspective: holding countless pieces of a puzzle but not having a picture of the whole with which to assemble them.”

So we reach the paradox of Larkin the librarian writing “Books are a load of crap”.
Yet reading is a wonderful and valuable pastime. Montaigne lists books as one of his three favourite ways of passing time along with friends and women (perhaps a more erudite version of wine, women and song if we take it that the pleasure of wine is in its being drunk in company).
So having accepted the value of reading, what shall we read?
We read incessantly. In fact in the internet age with eyes glued to the screen, reading is what we’re doing most of the time (what you’re doing now) and often for very practical purposes. No it’s not that, of course: what I want to write about is reading books, especially gratuitously, that is books not immediately necessary for our everyday living.
But which books ? There is a finite number of books we can read in a lifetime. Therefore, each book read represents the missed opportunity of several other books unread.
In Montaigne’s day , the late 16th century, there weren’t quite so many books as now and most of those of note were still in Latin or Greek. He probably had most of them in the library in his tower where he used to write his essays. It was just still possible as renaissance man to have an encyclopaedic reading knowledge, but even then the possibility was already receding.
We, however, will have to select. Maybe we should just follow our fancy and dip in to as many different authors as possible. We shouldn’t be afraid to give up on something that is not having any impact on us (just think of what we could be reading instead) though a certain amount of patience and persistence can yield unexpected rewards.
I myself confess to the boyish habit of list making - “I must read these books this year”. But I never get to the end, I go off on a new tangent - and maybe come back. I am also an incorrigible re-reader. As my memory becomes cluttered with too many things, sometimes I can scarcely remember the plot and main characters’ names - but I do remember if I thought it was good and may want to come back to it. Why else, indeed, keep books if not to re-read them ?
Ruskin said “a book worth reading is a book worth buying”. I buy too many books. I’ll get round to them some day, they represent previous lists of good intentions. If I never bought another book, I probably would have enough to keep me going for the rest of my life. But which book shall I read next ?
Perhaps while I reflect I can share with you what I read last, over the course of my fiftieth year.
As I studied literature at university, I have a marked preference for fiction with literary pretensions, though I also read books on among other things history, biography and philosophy. I try to read at least one book a year in my other languages - French, German, Italian, Spanish.
The main projects -
Virginia Woolf: all nine novels, including “the Waves” which is one of my favourite books, often re-read; and a “Room of one’s own”
Montaigne: most of the essays (95/107)
Classics -
Homer: “the Odyssey”, “the Iliad”, More: “Utopia”, Voltaire “Candide”, Machiavelli “il Principe”, Goethe “Faust I and II”, “die Leiden des jungen Werthers”, Borges “Ficciones”, Basho “The narrow road to the deep north”,
New novels -
Hosseini: “the Kite-runner”, Pamuk “Snow”, Haddon “A spot of bother”, Camilleri “La pista di sabbia”, Rowling “Harry Potter 7”
Other novels -
Greene: “the Confidential agent”, Lessing: “the Golden notebook”
History -
Gibbon “Decline and fall” books 2 + 3, Wilson “After the Victorians”, Hobsbawm “Age of extremes”
Biography -
“Autobiography of the Pythons”, Seth “Two lives”
Other -
Levitt/Dubner “Freakonomics”, Paxman “the English”

I clearly have been reading quite a lot. So I must enjoy it.
I shall return to some of these authors in greater detail in future postings.

About... About being here

Dear Reader,
This blog is called “About being here”.
To begin with that was because my initials are A.B.H. (Bach and Shostakovich after all took the letters of their names as the starting notes for some of their compositions).
But having created it I didn’t know what to write in it. It was always going to be about me and my experience of life, in short, about being here. However, I didn’t yet have the way in. I didn’t want to write a pedestrian diary (“Woke up, got out of bed, Dragged a comb across my head”). Or a series of more occasional pieces in the style of “what I did during my holidays”. Or rants soon to be regretted. So I didn’t start.
Over the last three months I have been reading Montaigne. It seems to me that if Montaigne had been writing his Essays now, they would have appeared as entries in his blog. I realized this is what I wanted to write.
His “essais” are exactly that: “attempts”; attempts at setting down certain aspects of life, of groping towards (for want of a better word) wisdom.
About being here, then, will be a series of attempts to capture what it is to be alive in the present, as experienced by myself..
Montaigne also writes to his reader, that his aim initially was to leave something of himself for those who knew him to read and remember him by.
So be it.
I hope you enjoy “about being here”.
ABH