‘The world is too much with us these days,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers..’

(Wordsworth)

SOME thoughts are so powerless to produce the action they would promote that the moment they’re spoken they feel rhetorical. To this category belong those lines by Wordsworth.

The English poet was writing in the dawn of the Industrial Revolution: of cities as we know them today, great hothouses of ‘getting and spending’; of the inconceivable acceleration that was beginning to ignite in every sphere of human life. His poetry, like that of his contemporaries, was really a desperation, an impotent struggle to prevent our brave new world from being born.

And he, Wordsworth, was even more defenceless than they. He lacked the towering imagination of Blake; he lacked Coleridge’s eliding insouciance. He lacked Shelley’s capacity to escape into thought, or Byron’s to escape into action. And he lacked Keats’ genius, which was its own answer to everything, as genius always is. He, Wordsworth, never partook of genius. He had only his inexhaustible soul.

And so he could only warn, and mourn, as what until his time had always been began passing away, and the long, languorous ages of Earth gave way to the Promethean age of The Cities, and men and women began living cheek by jowl with other men and women whose names they didn’t know, and people at work were persuaded to accelerate their output (and that was a new word: output) with the fiction that they might earn, no longer what they needed, but a surplus of it, aka wealth (except that other, canny souls were there to show them how the list of what they needed was somehow growing apace) until the pace of life became so overheated that it had to invent its own safety valve, the vacation, that winding down interregnum between exhaustions (and that was a new phenomenon, ‘vacations,’ and that was a new phrase: ‘winding down’) and the idea of going down to the sea or up into the mountains came to be the (part time) expression of the old monastic soul’s-impulse to retreat.

Well, when you have made a world that’s so denatured, so cruel to our mortalities, I suppose you’d better be able to retreat from it from time to time. That’s why I came here, to this artists’ colony in New Hampshire: an old white mansion with manicured lawns, and beyond them 20-odd studio-cottages scattered about 300 acres of pine forest on the slopes of rolling hills. And I suppose it’s also why, when from my cottage window I spot a fellow-resident trudging along some woodland path (holding to his chest a book, in the way American footballers hold the pigskin) I am sometimes startled by the mirage that I am watching Wordsworth, on parole one last time from his futureless future, making his solitary way through a silence which is only perfected by birdsong, or the rustle of a porcupine or raccoon, or the sudden jackhammer thuddings of a woodpecker.

On such occasions I stop and watch him, a diminutive figure, trudging uphill (eyes lowered, book held to his chest) along a path edged with bracken and mossed boulders and the stilly-falling green light of the pines, until he disappears into the trees again. And his irruption seems as mysterious as it seems pointless: a snatch of lost time, made visible as a curve, or as if, on the thrumming canvas of the present, Memory’s finger should sketch an enigmatic, brief arc, leading from nowhere to nowhere, green to green. We are 200 years on, in our raging descent. Much, much too late for you, Sir.

‘This place is nowhere, really,’ a New York painter said to me, my second day here, when, sitting on the mansion’s steps after dinner, in the depthless light of evening, I remarked the unreality of the great silence, the leisurely strollings, the unperturbed vistas of lawn and pine.

I thought ‘Good,’ but did not say it, because he went on to enquire about the light in my own country, and I found myself trying to describe its hard glistening, or its dry-season haze, and how at dusk the day’s blue drains from the sky until the latter’s colourless, and doesn’t stay and mix in with the welling blackness to make indigo, the colour of sadness, as it does here. At dusk here the small clouds to the west above the pines are backlit by the sunken sun. It fringes each one where it thins, fraying, with a wide luminescent border, so that only the heart of it’s grey, and this gives them finitude and place, somehow, and you can see they are floating. Beyond them, out of sight, I imagine the sea, because that’s what’s west of us, back home. But there’s a lot of land between here and Lake Michigan.

But, good: I thought it then, and think it still. It’s good to be nowhere — in this place which, like a wrong insert in the text of Time, recalls a gone Trinidad, though God knows it seems now like another country, it having been so many years since it lost its vitality and assumed in memory, or was this really only childhood, the sunlit, green silence of a dream. Butterflies bouncing above the tips of the long grass on the hot, silent slopes of Chancellor Hill; the cold water of Toco’s forgotten streams, here silently drifting, there rustling among stones, the brown riverbed clear in the forest then suddenly black as it emerged into the light at the forest’s edge. Ten years later, empty Maracas at night, the long, lifting, pallidly gleaming wet beach which would bring the slim shadow of your girl back to you (the long legs and white short-shorts becoming clear first) with a squeaking of sand at the last but with no words spoken, since she’d been made thoughtful by her rendezvous with the night…

Well, it doesn’t matter, they are gone. The red eyes of the rapist haunt Chancellor Hill these days, and there are trap-guns in the forest, no mother would let her eight-year-old wander there anymore. And what young couple would think to drive out to Maracas on a weekday night, and lie with no trepidation (out of sight of their car) on the empty beach, moonlit, alone?

Here in New Hampshire the mornings are cold and clear, and even the evenings are warm enough for a T-shirt. There’s wildlife in the forest, squirrels, porcupines, ground hogs, many species of birds, and one evening while we were at dinner a family of white-tailed deer came out of the tree-line and stood about the mansion’s lawn grazing, and another evening one resident reported seeing a black bear and her cub, in the undergrowth on the slope below her studio. I think about them sometimes when, armed only with a torchlight, I’m bicycling back to my own studio through the black forest late at night.

And that is the only time I get the feeling of being back in the Caribbean — when, riding through the forest late at night, I think of the bear.

I have slept for days with my windows open; have left things all over the place — my watch in a communal bathroom, my camera in the lounge, my wallet (my wallet!) on the pool table — and each time had them casually returned. If I stayed here long enough I might remember what being human might once have meant. But that would unmake me for the world.

Some nights when the wind blows I hear the ocean, and something comes at night and eats the lunch-leavings I scrape into the grass off to one side of my porch. But mornings, though I wake early, the pines are already there, the leaves to the east backlit, lime-green and tendrilled, and in the shade of the cottage a darker green, like home.

This place may be one of the last of Nature’s monasteries, with its silent studios hidden in the folds of slopes, and deer coming out of the tree-line at dusk, and Wordsworth trudging into sight along a path, and then going back again into the shade. It may be anachronistic and artificial, a bell jar world; it may be, as the New York painter said, Nowhere. But after all we’ve become and made of our world since Wordsworth — after the blind acceleration and treadmill enervations and poisoned air of home, after the thundering adrenalin high of Manhattan, the great exhaustion with which I arrived here — Nowhere is as good a place as any.