Skip to main content

Three visions of living in freedom.




Rowena Farre (in fact Daphne Lois Macready) is an enigma. The author of three highly accomplished books that while purporting to be autobiography contain a certain level of fictionalization! Everything has the resonance of truth, well-told yet putting the three books and what little is known of her life together establishes a pattern of inconsistencies that set up a now probably irresolvable puzzle!

Her first book, 'Seal Morning', accounts for her childhood, growing up in Sutherland, Scotland, on a remote croft. A croft acquired by an aunt on retiring from school teaching and shared with a menagerie of animals including a common seal (Lora), a rat (Rodney), two otters (Hansel and Gretel), and a dog (Ben) amongst other animals.

It is wholly and pervasively charming - and pure escapism as its initial reviewers noted. Not escapism that overly sentimentalized life but offered a refreshing counterpoint of resilience, connectedness, and freedom that any urban dweller might gaze on wistfully. This, as well as the quality of the writing, accounted for the book's early success running through five reprints in its first year.

We are taken through the seasons, the practicalities of life, the individual characteristics of the animals, and the joys and challenges of living with them and introduced to some of Farre's neighbors and friends, sparsely scattered in this wilderness. As with all Farre's books, there is interest too in folklore and local culture especially when it borders the supernatural. Here she weaves tales of water horses luring people to their deaths, magical relationships of seal and human; and, the second sight to good account, leavening her (and her aunt's) exemplary groundedness and practicality to good and lively effect.

The principal inconsistency of the book is she claims that she lived here continuously for seven years, from the age of ten to seventeen, while her father was in India. Yet it is clear from other sources that she went to boarding school (as expected of a girl of her background and class). I can only presume that as with her book on traveling with Gypsies and Travellers https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/07/on-hopes-realities-and-shadows-of-being.html her literary device is here one of extending the time, as she contracted it in the other book while eliminating the schooling part of her life, from which she presumably went back and forth, probably because, given her reclusive and unconventional nature, it was too public, hidebound and irksome to mention!

All told the three books https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-beckoning-land-that-is-within.html are a significant accomplishment, a string of minor classics, that evoke three separate but over-lapping worlds and that are important not for what they tell us of the author but what she has observed and seen of worlds apart from the ordinary and that betokens independence - both spiritual and material - that invite us to (re)consider what we imagine to be freedom in a life well lived. The frugality, companionship, and community of a Scottish life; the roving freedom and solidarity of a Gypsy life; and, the solitude and searching depth of an eremitic life. Three visions as a counterpoint to our settled worlds.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more