A Light in the Dark: A Winter Memoir

"The first thing to say is that I’m fearful for this book. I’m concerned that it’s going to be characterised as a book that’s just about SAD, and it is so much more than that. It’s a book in which he uses depression as a sort of dark light to highlight some desolate questions: Who is he? What is his relationship to the natural world? What is his relationship to his family? His low mood has made him wonder what he is. Is he an agent at all? Is he ruled by his past? Is he ruled by some malevolent archetypes welling up from his subconscious? He’s one of our great nature writers, I think. He says that the wilderness always speaks balm. But he’s realistic. Near the beginning of the book, he talks about how maintaining his faith with the natural world will carry him through the winter. Then, right at the end of that paragraph, he says, rather tremulously, “or such is the hope.” In fact the hope is frustrated. Yes, there are moments in which he looks at his valley and thinks: ‘This is wonderful. Why have I alienated myself from it? Yes, this can keep me safe, or heal me.’ But it’s not long before the wolf creeps close to his hearth again, and he realises that these moments of balm are not real healing. They’re just tiny sparks in the dark. The only real healing comes from that part of the natural world which is his family. “All hermits, however great the view from their cave, and however attentive their non-human companions, are wretched” The big lesson here is that your human community (being composed of wild things) is part of the wilderness. It is of course true that we need to relate to the non-human world—for our health and for the health of the wild world. But the non-human world by itself can’t make humans thrive. All hermits, however great the view from their cave, and however attentive their non-human companions, are wretched. All our romantic beliefs about redeeming sunsets, interconnectedness, and our kinship with birds falter when they face a big test like the one described in Clare’s book. But our human relationships stand the test—or at least, if they don’t, nothing else will. Those human relationships are actually just a special example of the relationships which we should have towards the wider world—but so special that they have a curative and prophylactic effect against the evils of the human condition that nothing else (even the song of whales, or the summit of a holy mountain, or the nuzzling of your dog) can have. Yes. It is psychologically fatuous, sociologically deadly, and ethically dangerous to see humans as atomistic entities—islands. I had nothing to do with my own conception, and have had very little to do with most of the things that have happened to me since. We are all utterly dependent creatures. That dependence should be a source of intense joy—not of frustrated disenfranchisement. Yet the atomistic model of the human person is the ruling presumption of the west."