Some thoughts on 'The Natural History of Selborne', by G. White

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'I am seized with wonder' - Gilbert White (1782)



'He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.' - Ecclesiastes



'It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.' - Gilbert White



'To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.'
- William Blake



(On White's 'The Natural History of Selborne'.) 'it is one of those ambiguous books that seem to tell a plain story... and yet by some apparently unconscious device of the author's has a door left open...' - Virginia Woolf



'And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.' - Stephen Graham



'If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.' - William Blake


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Forget Jim Morrison, forget Huxley and the metaphysics of 'post-human' experience, and perhaps we can read Blake's message today as an emblem and motto for people who commit theselves to having open eyes: those fine natural historians and bird-watchers, those interested artists and writers, those absorbed fans and those passionate local historians. People who commit to noticing, logging. The failure of our witness to the world is inevitable, but White simply looked harder, looked 'narrowly' and more patiently. As Beckett said: 'fail better'. We should all be 'seized' by what we see. Look harder; reach; love. 'Examine'. Absorb. 'Cleanse'.



'I am seized with wonder' - Gilbert White (1782)