‘Is this the road?’ Paola said.
I stopped in my tracks. I had heard the noise as welclass="underline" a hollow murmur.
‘No,’ she said, before I could answer. ‘It’s the wind.’
The wind in the woods has a different voice from the sound it makes in the city – it is like a wail from deep in an old person’s throat.
We were in a place where sounds come not from cars, trains and buses, but from wind, leaves, branches and beasts – from things not human creeping at the edges of our vision, and out of sight. We were utterly lost.
Yet the objective situation didn’t justify what I felt – a rising fear that blocked my stomach, froze my chest, and filled my head with an anger directed not exactly at myself, or at Paola, but at the present moment in its entirety. We were the only humans for miles around. Who knew how many miles? Truth to tell it couldn’t be that many miles, but by now primal fears had hijacked my rationality. I knew we were not far from civilization, but I could not see any trace of civilization: all I saw, and heard, and smelt, was a deep forest, which might go on for ever. I was scared. Why was that?
It dawned on me that I was not used to such a complete lack of structure.
I had spent all my life surrounded by human inventions, both physical (roads, walls, computers) and social (laws, cash, manners). If I broke a leg in Greenwich, there were other humans who would help me, ambulances that would come and get me. If I were lost in Paris I could ask for directions. If I were hungry in Rome I could buy food, if it started raining in Milan I could enter a bar and wait for it to pass. Human inventions had enveloped me completely since the moment I was born. The backdrop of my life had been a film set composed of reassuringly familiar objects: buildings, roads, clocks, signs. Even in rural southern Italy I was never far from a house, a farm, a second cousin who would come and get me.
Here in the woods, Paola and I were alone – or, to put it more precisely, we were not with humans. We had fallen off the human grid, and we were utterly powerless without it. If we had a map with us, or if our phones were working, we would still be anchored to the world. But, as things stood, we were not on a point on a map in a place owned by humans; we were in a nameless wood with more beech than oak where night was falling fast. The time signalled by my watch didn’t matter; what mattered was whether it was dark or not. This place existed on its own, with us or without us. It was Faerie.
The moment I realized that – and all these thoughts passed through my mind very quickly – a strange elation spread from my head to my feet. The fear was still there, and yet I also felt, on top of it, relief. I was free. Paola and I could jump and scream and only birds would think we were two idiots. The coordinates of a map are the bars of a cage and we had escaped. We could tear our clothes off and start making love in the centre of the path and nobody would care. We were in the wild. We were wild. I absolutely loved it.
The well-trained voice in my mind that always wants to spoil the fun was yelling at me that these thoughts were ridiculous, that it took a special kind of fool to consider the New Forest ‘wild’ in any sense, that the path we were on was human-made, that my backpack was a human invention. I was still firmly tethered to the film set. If I had really lost my way, if I were, say, floating in outer space, I would not feel free, I would feel terrified.
That voice did not spoil the fun. That strong feeling of being in the wild, of being wild, finally liberated, remained with me.
The trees came alive all around me, and so did the grass, and the flowers that were closing their petals for the night. As we continued randomly on our way, pretending that we were choosing particular paths for a particular reason, the forest was moving around us, changing its nature, becoming not just a voiceless place we were walking through, but a talkative companion we were walking with. The forest was as real as we were. It did not exist for our sake, but for its own. It was breathing, sovereign, independent. It was a presence.
The hollow murmur returned.
This time, it was the road.
*
Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and Dachau, wrote a book inspired by his experiences there. Man’s Search for Meaning is a manual offering guidance on how to cope with life’s darker challenges, including hopelessness and a loss of sense of direction. In the camps, Frankl observed the sometimes counter-intuitive psychological strategies prisoners used to get by, and he reasoned that if such strategies worked there, they could also help us with more humdrum daily struggles. One of the things he found was that prisoners developed a sense of meaningful connection between their inner life and the natural world.
There are those who believe that an inner life is a luxury for people who have too much time on their hands, or who aren’t tough and resourceful enough to face up to real life. Searching for wonder, prizing beauty, striving for a deeper meaning to our existence – these are trivialities we shouldn’t waste our time on. High-achieving, go-getting individuals don’t have time for trees, birds and wild flowers – they have eyes only for spreadsheets. Life is tough, so you need to be tougher. And being tougher means getting on with life, without seeking refuge in woolly notions of ‘inner life’ or – even worse – ‘spirituality’.
Not true, Frankl whispers. During his time at Auschwitz and elsewhere, he observed that the brutality of daily existence in a concentration camp made inner life more, rather than less, intense. The prisoners who survived longest were the ones who treasured that intensity. Frankl describes a personal, almost mystical, experience in which he came to understand that ‘the salvation of man is in love and through love’. Even in the worst situation possible, Frankl realized, even when you are on your knees, you can still ‘achieve fulfilment’1 by contemplating a mental image of the person you love. Frankl had been separated from his wife, Tilly, in the final weeks of the war, and he knew that he might never see her again (indeed, she died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen after having been forced to work in conditions of ‘terrible, indescribable suffering’). Yet the simple and unassailable fact of their love, the fact that she had existed and that there had been an unbreakable bond between them, was enough to sustain him, even in the face of death.
Despite becoming more introspective, the prisoners did not shut themselves off from the world outside. The ‘intensification’ of their inner lives actually led them to a deeper appreciation of art and nature. People who had been taken from their homes, separated from their families, starved and beaten, still managed to find pleasure in small things. It was common for prisoners toiling in the woods to take a moment to look at the sunset; and in their huts they would organize ‘a kind of cabaret’ as entertainment.
Frankl recalls how once, while working in a trench at dawn, under grey skies, he was lost in memories of his wife. He felt a strong sense that she was there with him, within physical reach, and when this sense was at its height, a bird flew close to him, perched on the ground, and looked at him.
A human being stripped bare took refuge in the only place left available, inside himself, and the paradoxical discovery he made there was a way out of himself through a connection with the natural world. He encountered a network of connections in which birds echoed his own thoughts, and the distinction between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ fell away. The bird is a common symbol for the soul, but Frankl met a real bird, not a symbol. To ask whether its appearance was a coincidence or a message would be to miss the point: its appearance was a mystery, in the sense we explored with the First and Second Key.