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"I'd like to peek into the drawing room, where you sometimes see only an open door into yet another room beyond the drawing room."

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Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, 1835


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To put a city in a book, to put the world on one sheet of paper - maps are the most condensed humanised spaces of all...

They make the landscape fit indoors, make us masters of sights we can't see and spaces we can't cover.



Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, 1977

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I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality.
But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like,
through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer.
​A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert.

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W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995


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Water hollows stone,

wind scatters water,

stone stops the wind.

Water, wind, stone.



Wind carves stone,

stone’s a cup of water,

water escapes and is wind.

Stone, wind, water.



Wind sings in its whirling,

water murmurs going by,

unmoving stone keeps still.

Wind, water, stone.



Each is another and no other:

crossing and vanishing

through their empty names:

water, stone, wind.



Octavio Paz, "Wind, Water, Stone”, The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987.




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A brown musically moving beauty, the earth’s fullness
Slides towards the sea. An escape
Of earth-serpent, with all its hoards, casting the land, like an old skin,
Pulling its body from under the eye.


Ted Hughes, Fairy Flood (River), 1983


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We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter towards its doom.

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Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943 
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Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper
In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky
A flock of wild birds follows;
Slanting over gloomy waters.


Georg Trakl, At the Moor, 1887-1914

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​‘In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.’

John Fowles, The Tree, 1979

The sensation that John Fowles so precisely anatomises is the feeling we have when we contemplate Guy Dickinson’s photographs. As records of the physical world and as pure sensory experience, their intricate visual fields circulate through us. Thicket is an Old English word, distinguishing areas of dense growth from thin woodland, where the trees grow more sparsely. With power and poetry, Dickinson’s images manifest the way these ‘thick’ territories are also thin places, where the veil between the earthly world and everything that is other feels most porous. Conventional polarities of form and space, light and shadow break down. Void acquires mass and the deepest darkness has a lambent quality. We start to lose ourselves and in this dissolution experience a thrum of profound recognition.

For hundreds - thousands - of years, we were people of the trees. Our earliest forebears inhabited landscapes dominated by vast forests of oak, ash, beech, elm, Scots pine, yew and chestnut. We lived, hunted and foraged in these woods and with its timber constructed shelters, kept warm, cooked, smelted and fashioned countless implements. Little wonder that trees saturate the stories we told ourselves to explain our origins and order our world view.

The first holy places in Neolithic times were artificial wooden groves of felled tree trunks whose coverings, Fowles observes ‘must have seemed to their makers less roofs than artificial leaf canopies’. Stonehenge he describes as a ‘petrified copse’. According to the belief system of the ancient Celtic druids, trees are the guardians of the land, doorways to the spirit world and the individual ancestors of human beings. When the druids cleared an area for a settlement, a single tree was always left standing in the centre and designated the tree of life. How much more compelling to think that man’s genesis tracks back not to the ordered paradise of a garden, but to the tangled fertility of a thicket - to one of Dickinson’s infinitely rich arboreal crucibles.
 
Alison Morris
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​Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust. 



Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, 1979




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Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.


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Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759


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From the Latin word 'errare':  to wander