Note by JRW: The following is an extract from a handwritten letter by Myatt, addressed to me. He dated it A Fine Day in Middle June.

A fine day in middle June, of hot Sun but cooling breeze, and I sit on the warm ground with my back resting against the wheel of my small cab-less tractor in this lunchtime respite from work. This is my special corner - beyond the fence to my right a small neglected copse of mostly Ash is fronted by a patch of tall nettles, Willow-herb and brambles; while, behind where I rest, is an overgrown hedge, two trees deep in places. Beneath one of the almost shrub, weed, covered fallen trees in the copse there is a fox's lair: two days ago, as I sat, almost sleeping in the warm Sun after sandwiches and milk-less tea from a flask, the Vixen stopped, right by the fence, to stare at me for a while before she turned away back into cover. I have seen her, there, before, and maybe I will soon see her again. Perhaps she is getting used to this slow moving, straggly-bearded, long-haired, flat-cap and olive-coloured-clothes wearing being whose hands, arms and face are tanned by months of Sun?

So many birds here, so many different calls and songs I wish I knew more than the few I know. Does it matter? Not really. Jay, Yellow Finch, Thrush, Blackbird, Robin, Sparrow, Wagtail... They are all part of the complex matrix, weaved by Nature: they are Nature, manifestly alive and presenced in this one small rural place. All I can hear are the songs, the calls, of birds, the sound of flies, bees, and the breeze stirring bushes, grass and leaf-full trees.

Yesterday, a Heron stood atop a young tree, unmoving, watching the low damp ground to the left of the copse where bull-rushes grow and where I have seen many a frog.

This, I feel, is how the world should be - how, perhaps, it was, before the vapid pace of change, of material lusts, overwhelmed us. I feel strongly attached to this very small piece of rural England, this special neglected place of about one acre, and it is good that I work nearby, mostly toiling with my hands in hot sweat-making Sun, cold rain, overcast skies, hail, a wind cold enough to numb my fingers even beneath two pairs of gloves. Here, there are the Robins which months ago first nested and who, every morning, would appear, as I sat to begin my morning with a customary drink of tea A few pieces of bread, and they were off, to feed their young, who - not long after, and fledged - would wait nearby for their parents to feed them the crumbs I gave. Even now, every morning, the two adult Robins appear as soon as I arrive, to wait chirping a few feet away.

This is how our world should be - with each of us connected to where we live, where we dwell, working in such a way that we have a symbiotic relationship with Nature, with the land, the very soil we depend upon to grow the food we eat. This is how it should be - with a quietness; with a working toil that brings us out into the fresh air, whatever the weather; and with a concern for only where we live, where we dwell, who we know and who live within no more than half a day's walk away.

Do we really need industries, the nations that grow them? Do we really need the vapid entertainment, the commercial music, spewed forth by profit-hungry, manipulative, totally un-numinous concerns whose minions have probably never done months of hard-manual toil in their lives and who are at home only in cities? Do we really need cities and the Nature-destroying often cruel always un-empathic things that support them? Do we need governments that concern themselves with abstract ideas and inhuman policies, and who scheme and plot, who deprive people of their liberty and who send people to kill other people in the name of some abstract idea or inhuman concept? 

Not long ago I was talking with an elderly man who remembered a very different way of life and whose father worked as a wood-worker in a typical village of that time, before what became known as the First World War. He told of how most things the village, the farms, needed for their daily life were made of wood, locally cut, shaped, crafted: carts, fences, gates, doors, even pumps. And what was not so made and crafted of wood, was more often than not made by a local blacksmith, or of stone quarried somewhere near. And now? The village is no longer so self-contained, and often only a residence for people whose cars or vehicles take them miles and miles away to work in some town or city in jobs which maintain the manic, rootless, un-numinous world they live in.

Several years ago, and for quite a few years, I worked on a farm with a man who had worked there for nearly fifty years - all his working life. From him, I learnt many things, especially about the way and manner of hard, outdoor, work. I learnt how to toil for hours on end - to not rush, to settle into a natural slowish working rhythm suited to the job. Then, as now, even the way I walked became unhurried. Gone was the quick walk of a rushing, harassed, man. Many times the two of us would walk - our long-handled hoes slung over our shoulders - along the road from one field to another. We must have seemed to the drivers of the many cars that passed, in our worn working old-fashioned clothes, with our slow amble, our fifty year old hoes, to belong to another age.

Not that I in those four years applied most of what was learnt, for I was still feckless, still restless, inside, still part of the vapid causal time of the modern world, with my ideas, my desire to change the world, my impatience. In those years I was indeed torn between such settled rural work, and my idealistic, youthful, vision of a better world - spending a few hours, a few days, working hard, and then neglecting my work to write an article, or go forth on travels, to meetings and the like. So, there, in that place, in those days, I was more often than not a bad worker: often slack and sometimes unreliable.

It was only when I began, last year, and almost a year ago, this current spell of outdoor work that I applied those lessons - and not consciously; not intentionally. Or rather, I became like him, that happy, uncomplicated farm-worker. For I settled into the slow, unhurried, pace of toil because, inside, in my being, I had ceased to be restless, ceased to be concerned about the external world, accepting, knowing that my world was my work, the village where I lived, the people I knew, the land where I dwelled.

So it is that I have become increasingly reluctant to travel away from here until this week that reluctance became more than reluctance: a quiet, still, determination to not do so again - to not venture from this small part of this rural English county ever again, unless it be for some reason, not of my doing, to find work such as I do now. There is simply no need, for I have become, by dwelling here, doing the work I do, something other than I was, changed as I have been partly by the knowledge, the understanding, of suffering, and partly by a real appreciation of Nature begun by that work on that farm with that worker six or more years ago.

But do not believe that I yearn for some non-existent romantic rural idyll. I know the hardness of this life, of how the work, the days, the weather, can wear you down, make limbs, back, hands, ache; of how some days I become wearied with a particular wearisome, repetitive task, and yearn for the day to end, to sit outside in the garden of the local Pub, alone with my pint of liquid food made from water and barley and flavoured with hops.....  But this simple life is my choice; there are good days, and bad days; usually more good days, especially when - as today and yesterday - the Sun warms and I can see the beauty of this Earth's blue sky. In many ways, I yearn for the warm, sunny days of an English Spring, Summer and Autumn, as I know there must be life-giving rain, and clouds to bear that rain. There is balance, which has brought the numinous beauty of this rural landscape, this land. 

The toil of earlier times was often much harder than it is now; but the toil that is necessary, now, to live simply, frugally, is not that hard - although it will be so for those who have never done such work! I remember how many people - especially young people - started work in the fields at my previous place of work. Some lasted a few hours; some lasted a week; a few lasted a few weeks. None lasted longer, leaving us two with our hoes, our taciturn ways, to knowingly smile.

The important thing is that we now have, and can make, a conscious choice - to live in the world, as it is, has become; or to live as we can, and - I believe - we should, simply, in an unaffected way, in harmony, symbiosis, with Nature, thus restraining ourselves, especially our desire for material possessions, for the things we really do not need, for the things which harm Nature, the living beings of Nature, and we ourselves, if we but knew it. And one of the most harmful things is a dishonourable ideology, of whatever kind, political, religious, social: a belief we have the answers, and that some law, some government, some abstract idea, some political or social policy, or religious belief, can and will change things for the better, even though - as it almost always does - such a thing involves a negation of the concept of personal honour, some suffering, some deaths, some people being dishonourably deprived of their liberty, their freedom, and some individuals using whatever arts of manipulation they can to convince others of the correctness of such a thing, which is always supra-personal, and as such always involves some people, or some government, having some dishonourable "authority" over others, on pain of punishment.

The way of numinosity - the simple way of reason, of restraint, of empathy with all living things, of symbiosis with Nature - does involve us changing ourselves but such change involves only a free, conscious, individual, choice. Thus, we can accept some of the hardships, the frugality, that such a life brings because we know that this is how we can and should live and that by so living we are not only not harming others, but aiding ourselves, our folk, Nature and the Cosmos - that is, we are doing the human thing; the civilized thing; the numinous thing. All else seems, and is, inauthentic, unnecessary, a turning away from the knowledge, the understanding, we have achieved - and especially a turning away from that empathy, that consciousness, that awareness of the matrix, of us as a connexion, a living nexus, which is the essence of our humanity and the beginning of the next stage of our human evolution.

Now, not only have I run out of writing paper (fortunate for you!) it is also somewhat past the time for me to resume the tasks of this working day.

DW Myatt