Uitgelezen 79

‘But Thomas also wished to live long and faithfully in a single place. At times – when lying under the whitebeams or when planting herbs and creepers – he experienced the desire to ‘take root forever’. The tree (immovable) and the bird (migrant) are among the two most distinctive presences in his writing; the forest (stable) and the path (mobile) its two most distinctive landscape features; and the root (delving downwards) and the step (moving onwards) its two contrasting metaphors for our relations with the world.
Thomas sensed that one of modernity’s most distinctive tensions would be between mobility and displacement on the one hand, and dwelling and belonging on the other – with the former becoming ubiquitous and the latter becoming lost (if ever it had been possible) and reconfigures as nostalgia. He experienced that tension between roaming and homing even as it was first forming. It is a tension I know something of myself. “It is hard to make anything like a truce between these two incompatible desires,” Thomas wrote in 1909, “the one going on and over the earth, the other that would settle for ever in one place, as in a grave and have nothing to do with change.” “For… years,” noted Helen after he had died, “Hampshire was his home county.” But then the need to move surged in him again and “he left Hampshire to enter the army, and never knew a home again.”’
[Robert Macfarlane, The Old ways, p. 322-323.]