Lost for Words

Sunset Buttermere, Cumbria

John Cowper Powys used an incredible number of words across the many years of his long writing life.  They poured from him and flooded onto the pages of his works.  Here, you think, is a man who was never lost for words but it seems there were occasions when his extensive vocabulary failed him.  Face to face with the beauty, wonder and mystery of the natural world, he had difficulty expressing the feelings that were inspired within him, grappled for words that aptly described an atmosphere, or a sight, sound or scent.  I have often felt frustrated at my own inability to convey my experiences of nature, to portray a true and vivid account of what I witnessed and felt.  A factual description has its place but is not the true essence of what is experienced.  It can seem impossible to relate in words, the feelings and thoughts inspired by a river, a spreading oak, moonlight, or the mysterious sense of timelessness of certain places.  The flow of John Cowper Powys’s words may have been stemmed at times but these glitches are not apparent to the reader.  Nature was central to his life, and in both his novels and his philosophical books there are some of the most beautiful passages relating to the natural world to be found anywhere in literature.  

“How can I find the right expression for the feelings that came to me in those days when the wind blew in a certain way as I followed some muddy grass-track along the edge of the Ely Road or the London Road?  How can I describe the feeling I got, as if all the scarce-noticed sensations that had come lightly and incidentally to long generations of my ancestors, when they met the rain, or felt the sun, or heard the calling of rooks or the twittering of sparrows, or saw the smoke rising from human hearths, were rushing over me, in a hardly bearable flood of ecstatic happiness, simply because, on that undistinguished road to the railway station, I heard some patient shop assistant mowing his scrap of grass behind a privet-hedge? 

 Woodland path, Cumbria

I know perfectly well that everybody born into the world has the feelings I am describing, is visited by these indescribable and apparently causeless transports.  I am not in the least suggesting that I am peculiar in this.  But why, in the Devil’s name, then, do we go on making a cult of everything else except these?  Why must politics, religion, philosophy, ambition, revolution, reaction, business, pleasure—all be considered intensely important, and these rare magical feelings not to be considered at all?   “Because, my good John,” you will answer, “these feelings come of themselves, and go of themselves, and don’t leave us any wiser or cleverer or kinder or richer!”  You have said it.  It is because they are different from these things, it is because they represent something totally beyond these things that such feelings are so precious!   A time will come when these feelings will no longer be the monopoly of women and babies and lovers and saints and mystics and idiots!

(John Cowper Powys, Autobiography)