A Star for Navigation
Energy, Memory and the Inner Template of Belonging
Energy and Memory
In the small library dedicated to his work in Grasmere, I have actually held the surviving manuscript paper on which Wordsworth rapidly began to form The Prelude. It is redolent with discovery and excitement, verses crammed at all angles, in pen, pencil; long rows of words springing out of the ground of his memory. Looking at it, you see not only a personal breakthrough taking place, but the first shaping of our own contemporary appreciation of the natural world. There could be no Environmental Protection Agency, no Sierra Club, no Discovery Channel, no National Parks without the Wordsworths of this world who first began to move our lips again in reverence to and participation with the natural order. In Wordsworth’s verses we are taught to see creation once again as a place to grow in, a place indicative of other worlds parallel to ours which necessarily put any single work we do as human beings into smaller and saner perspectives.
Wordsworth’s absolute faith in physical memory and the energies they represent is a testament to the way a deeply personal experience, given a work and a vessel to carry it, can speak to thousands of others and affect, in pivotal ways, whole worlds and ways of thinking yet to be born. This is one of the great beauties of a private work made manifest in a very public world. Wordsworth, unknown to us, is in every conversation we have about the beauty of a mountain, a seascape, or a sky. Work at its best is the arrival in an outer form of something intensely inner and personal; and the act of working itself—a bridge between the public and the private, a bridge of experience which can be an agony and an ecstasy to cross.
