Why we speak

Another quote from "Albion":

"The mark or symbol of the hawthorn tree is to be found in the runic alphabet of the ancient British tribes, as if the landscape propelled them into speech."--p. 3

To speak is to name. To name is to know--to make known. Alternatively, to be spoken to is to be known. I never feel like I know a child until she begins to talk to me. From the moment my friend's little girl called me by name and began to chatter away, it was like a door opening into a hallway filled with more doors into more rooms. She was like a seed planted in the earth, and when I returned to check on it, I found a tree antlered with many branches and crowned with many leaves.

If you were mute, and saw a tree--one of those remarkably old trees, like the redwoods in California or the squat dreaming oaks in England--would you be compelled to speak?

Roots and fingers

I knew that I would like "Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination" when I opened the book to the first chapter and saw that it was titled, simply, "Tree." As is obvious from the subtitle, the book seeks to investigate the varied and rich history of the English imagination. The following quote illustrates why the ever important first chapter of this hefty, door-stopper of a book is devoted to trees:

"The tree encloses a communal memory--'beyond the memory of anyone now living', as the medieval rubric was later to express it--and from it derives that sense of place, of literal rootedness, which is one of the great themes of the English imagination."--p. 5-6

It never fails to amaze me how language boosts our understanding of the world. It's one thing to flatly state that the English have a sense of place; it's another to use the image of a tree to illustrate how strong that sense of place is. As you contemplate the image of the tree, your fingers feel the grip of the roots on the soil as they work their way deeper in, ever deeper.