Free On a Farther Shore by William Souder Page B

corps.Williamson again saw heavy fighting, and after being injured and falling ill during two months of artillery bombardments and poison gas attacks, Williamson was again evacuated back to England.He recovered and was returned to the war once more in the spring of 1918. It’s unclear what happened to him during his final three weeks of fighting back at the front, but he was “shaky” when he was sent home to convalesce again.
    Williamson had begun a novel about his wartime experiences during one of his furloughs home, and after the war he devoted himself in equal measures to writing andtearing around the countryside on a Norton motorcycle, a passion that would later morph into a love of sporty motorcars.Sometime in the summer of 1919 Williamson discovered a slim memoir called
The Story of My Heart
by the English essayist and nature writer Richard Jefferies.
    Raised on a farm halfway between London and Bristol, Jefferies from an early age indulged in frequent, solitary communion with the outdoors that began as an enthusiasm for hunting and tramping the countryside and evolved into a solemn reverence for nature. His reputation rested mainly on his nature essays, including the intense and revealing
Story of My Heart
, which he wrote as an autobiography. Published in 1883, just four years before Jefferies’s death, the book is an account of the author’s love of the natural world that is at times exquisite and in other places overripe with mystical mumbo jumbo. In the opening pages, Jefferies explains the connection to nature thatilluminated his innermost feelings as a young man, when he would make a daily hike to the summit of a hilltop from which he could survey the English countryside:
    Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth’s firmness—I felt it bear me up: through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me. I thought of the wandering air—its pureness, which is its beauty; the air touched me and gave me something of itself. I spoke to the sea: though so far, in my mind I saw it, green at the rim of the earth and blue in deeper ocean; I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory.
    And so on.
    Jefferies was an odd man, tall but stooped, enthusiastic but humorless. As a youth, he grew his hair long and wandered about with his gun and his deepening thoughts, much to the consternation of his neighbors. By the time he came to write
The Story of My Heart
Jefferies had acquired a set of unusual beliefs. He thought that all accidents and diseases were preventable—that the innumerable tragedies that befall human beings were the result of carelessness and stupidity. He saw no reason why everyone should not live long past the age of one hundred. He did not believe in God. He did not believe that things “happen for the best.”
    On the contrary, Jefferies was stricken by the knowledge that good people often endure nightmarish lives, while those who do evil are just as often rewarded for their misdeeds. “Human suffering,” he wrote, “is so great, so endless, so awful that I can hardly write of it.” He hated being indoors and disliked all quotidian activities, which he thought useless.His natural companions, he wrote, were “the earth, and sun, and sea, and stars by night.” Jefferies believed that we are on our own in the universe and that if human affairs could be properly directed it would be by some wise and benevolent dictator.
    And yet, in a rapturous passage in
The Story of My Heart
, Jefferies confessed that despite the countless cruelties of existence, his hunger for life was insatiable and the one thing he wanted was
more
of it all: “I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek—my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever had has satisfied my soul.”
    Some