ABSTRACT
It happens every so often that our scholarly preoccupations not only intersect with but directly enhance our interactions with the world at large, and that those interactions in turn inform and refine the course of study that originally provoked them. The present project is an example of such a refinement, what I would characterize more precisely as a cleansing of the doors of perception. Indeed one cannot, I think, examine the literature of everyday life without becoming by degrees more sensibly aware of and alive to one's own habitual surroundings and motions. The emphasis on ‘degrees’ is important here because perceptual cleansing is never the result of a single motion, a clean sweep; we begin to see rather in part, one spot at a time. In support of this notion I submit from personal experience an admittedly unspectacular but nevertheless memorable moment, one that serves, moreover, as a preliminary corrective to Weiskel's dismissive commentary on the effects of daffodils on the modern. 1 The experience followed and was, I think, quite clearly informed by an intensive re-reading of Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden and Grasmere Journals in the spring of 2001. I recall being particularly struck by Wordsworth's description of winter trees in the entry for May 14, 1802:
The woods looked miserable, the coppices green as grass which looked quite unnatural and they seemed half shrivelled up as if they shrunk from the air. O thought I! what a beautiful thing God has made winter to be by stripping the trees and letting us see their shapes and forms. What a freedom does it seem to give to the storms! (Journals 125)
A few days after revolving in my mind this curious immersion in miserable beauty, I happened to be striding across Dalhousie's upper campus on a colourless March morning, eyes turned down, collar against the wind, when, while passing under a tree whose presence I had perhaps never even registered 188before, a bird-call from above stopped me. Something about its clarity, its precise arrival in the lapse of my own thoughts, arrested all progress. I looked up and saw above me not a bird but a tangle of slick-grey branches flowing in all directions like spilled quicksilver. I do not know how long I stood transfixed while bodies continued to press by me but I do know that I have never seen a tree like it before or since.