When I go for walks in the countryside some weekends I wonder where the sense of wonderment is in me when I get there. It's lacking. Hills, woodlands, streams, fields etc, and the things that live in them. It's a bit of fresh air. Not much more.
Then - a new thing - sometimes, weeks afterwards I might be on my computer at work or be stood at a photocopier listening to ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum as the pages travel through its internal workings, and ba-dum those outdoors places are suddenly super vividly remembered and travelling through me. My memory has usually been like one of those things, um, with holes in it, to strain vegetables, what's it called? You know. That thing.
The remembered places might also be a little tea room visited in another city, and I am there again and can get up from that chair and explore.
If it's what Proust had so he could write about any moment in his life in all its completeness no wonder he could bang out 30 pages on what he had for breakfast one morning when he was five. He was able to be back there, poking around.
As for my general numbness to nature there is one thrillingly big tree in the car park behind work that has beguiled me of late. The height, movement, colour, it's like a world of itself; pale rusty warm tops and faded gray undersides of leaves all living fully in the breeze - makes me stop, bicycle in hand, and watch, forgetful of that ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum momentum that was taking me away home to make my tea.
