Six Facets of Light – Ann Wroe (2016)

This is a wonderful and difficult book; more, as John Carey said in his review, ‘almost not a book at all, more a window into another mind.’ It records Ann Wroe’s thoughts and jottings during walks on the South Downs. The subject they circle around is light- what its nature is, and how it has been imagined by a miscellany of much-loved writers and artists whose lives and works seem to have become second nature to her. Among poets, Thomas Traherne, the mystic William Blake, the farm labourer, John Clare and Walt Whitman; among prose writers, Bunyan, Thoreau and Richard Jefferies, the Victorian nature writer as well as Gilbert White, the 18th century nature writer. What unites them is a feeling for the wonder of the ordinary. It is a gift Wroe shares; and one which is shared, with greater or lesser intensity, by many walkers. The everyday and the erudite are at ease with each other in her mind, and although most walkers will not reach her levels of knowledge, the book which sounds orderly, is ‘really just a rich, radiant ramble.’ Walking is a great time to think or simply to switch off completely.

This small excerpt is Wroe about Gilbert White:

‘ One morning in September 1741Gilbert White woke to a world of gossamer. It  began with meshes of dewy cobweb in the stubbles and clover grounds, and continued with showers of rags of web from the sky, ‘falling into sight and twinkling like stars as they turned their sides towards the sun.’ Over an area of some twenty square miles of Hampshire chalk country from Bradley to Alresford, to Selborne, the gossamers fell all day, hanging in the trees and hedges ‘so thick, that a diligent person sent out might have gathered baskets full.’ Each filament of this web - landscape was made by a minute spider shooting out a thread- once from White’s finger, one from a page of his book, as he watched in astonishment.’