For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers…
Those were the words of the German-Swiss novelist, Herman Hesse, in his book about trees. Whoever knows how to speak to them, and whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. The general image of speaking to trees might portray mankind’s attempt to escape towards something that will not listen; to stand before it and speak to it without waiting for a reaction from the other end. But in Hesse’s perspective, those same trees will not just stand idly, no, but in fact, the tree will mock those who escape from themselves. Life is not easy, and simultaneously it is not difficult; it is looking for a homeland, but home is not a piece of land, nor is it formed between geographical borders, home is within the one who escapes. Just like how the one who learns how to listen to trees will no longer want to be a tree but will want to remain as he is. That is the homeland, and that is happiness.
Dostoyevsky once said, “There is only one thing that I dread; not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl gave the perfect example to this saying in his famous autobiographical book Man’s Search for Meaning when he recounted his experience in the Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz. Frank’s aim through writing this book was not necessarily to recount the events and struggles he faced in the concentration camp as a separate personal event, but he included it in his studies of logotherapy treatment as part of existential and humanistic theories. Woe to those who lead a meaningless life. A single phrase that sufficiently summarizes this form of treatment that does not focus on revealing the pain, and the agonizing events and thoughts that cause paranoia and illnesses, but on the contrary, focuses on the future, goals, and the meaning that mankind should live for and seek to achieve. It is less of a dream, and more of a spiritual state that affirms the reasons and meanings that mankind struggles in life for.
One of the tasks that were assigned to Dr. Frankl in the Auschwitz concentration camp was to supervise patients suffering from typhoid. Those people were unfairly imprisoned, caged, and isolated from the rest of the world, suffering from fatal illnesses. Even the sick bay at the camp had no real function other than a temporary passageway leading to their demise. It is an enormous suffering; one that is so difficult to envisage. There is no weight to any words used to console them in their dying moments. They lost everything, and yet, their souls carried a tremendous power in their internal freedom, a freedom that can overcome and exceed any bounds despite their captivity and hunger. They may have lost everything, but that sense of inner freedom is not something that can be stolen and imprisoned. According to Dr. Frankl, it is this sense of freedom that gives life meaning and makes it worth living.
Among the deceased whose life stories were contained within the pages of Frankl’s book, there is a story of a young woman. A story that seems like a poem. “This young woman knew that she would die, and she was cheerful in spite of that knowledge.” It was as if the story of her life, and the beauty of her soul were set to burst in those last moments. She said that “she was grateful that fate has hit [her] so hard” and that in her former life she was “spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Truth be told, she was not aware of the beauty of her soul and how powerful it was only until she reached the end of her road, isolated and abandoned by all. She could only seek refuge within her soul and internal freedom which lent her the immense power she needed to cheerfully come to terms with what fate had in store for her. But then, she said something interesting, she pointed to the window towards the trunk of a tree and said that the tree was “the only friend [she] has in her loneliness.” And then she added that she often talked to the tree. Was she suffering from delusions or fleeting psychosis in her last moments? What did the tree tell her? She answered, “it said to me, ‘I am here- I am here- I am life, eternal life!”
Ellison, R.; Oak Trees; Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/oak-trees-11427
The late American literary critic Harold Bloom states that Leo Tolstoy’s best work is his novella Hadji Murad, which was only published after his death. It tells the story of the titular protagonist Hadji Murad, an Avar rebel commander and the vicissitudes that occurred in his life, from courageously fighting the Russians, to joining their side. A reader once described the end of this novella as ‘cinematic.’ I would not call its conclusion cinematic, because cinema, despite its highly artistic abilities, fails to portray the weight and influence that words hold.
The story starts with Tolstoy’s narration, returning home through fields of grown meadows, with people preparing for harvest. The delightful flowers shining peculiarly in the sunlight, and on his way, the narrator was collecting a large bouquet of flowers when he saw a patch of thistle flowers, which they call ‘Tartar’ in the neighborhood, in a ditch. He climbed down the ditch and swatted away a bumblebee that had taken refuge in the flower’s center. He tried to pluck the flower, but it proved to be an arduous task as it was very resistant. It took a heated struggle of five minutes for him to finally succeed in plucking the thorny thistle from the ground, only then did he realize that although it was beautiful, it did not fit with the rest of the flowers in the bouquet he had collected.
While recounting the effort he had to put into plucking the flower he thought, “But what energy and tenacity! With what determination it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life!” He continued his trail home, and on his right, there was bush and another bunch of thistles. This ‘Tartar’ had three newly grown branches, but one of them was broken, and hanging like “the stump of a mutilated arm.” The last stalk was broken and soiled with mud yet still stood erect. A cartwheel had passed over it, but it had risen again. Like a warrior with his guts and innards dawn out, an arm torn off, and his eyes plucked out. It did not surrender to man who destroyed all its brothers around it; “What vitality!” thought the narrator. “Man has conquered everything and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won’t submit.”
Tolstoy, through his narration, interrupts his admiration of the trees and flowers and recounts an old Caucasian tale that he partly lived through, partly passed down through other testimonies, and the rest through his imagination of the events. This is the tale of Hadji Murad. What is the tie between his admiration of the trees and flowers to the story of the revolutionary Avar rebel Hadji Murad? This is the story about the persevering flower that resisted man’s forces and refused to give up its life and existence, and following the same pattern, it is a story about Hadji Murad, the rebel who fought not to be ripped away from his land, his sky, and his people. After the rebel’s story ends, the narrator goes back to the same flower, comparing its final struggle in life to that of Hadji Murad’s.
How did Tolstoy paint different pictures through trees?
Through his major literary pieces, such as War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy managed to paint several pictures and imageries of trees and nature. But before writing those literary pieces, there was a life filled with extended greenery and nature. Henri Troyat, the critic and novelist, in his biography on Tolstoy, described his birthplace in Yasanya Polyana as an extended farmland where horses run long distances, and trees and flowers fill the sights, fully surrounded by a river making it resemble the garden of Eden.
Throughout his childhood, Tolstoy’s older brother would often tell him about a tree trunk in the forest which held the secret of happiness. As told in some narrations about their lives, his brother would take him to look for this tree, but it is said that they never succeeded in coming across it. And Tolstoy’s granddaughter says that her grandfather would listen to the old village’s folktales that say that happiness is wherever trees are planted, and so he planted some trees in the surrounding Yasanya Polyana forests. The old man remembered the lovely folk tales after years and expressed his desire to be buried under those trees, and in the end, he was buried accordingly.
Austrian writer Stefan Zweig says, “a rectangular mound, above which trees form a dome, without a cross, a headstone, or an engraving. A great man lies like any hobo, or like an unknown soldier killed in battlefield. Not Napoleon’s burial place under the marble dome in Les Invalides, nor Goethe’s coffin in Fürstengruft evoke such a deep emotion such as the emotions that are aroused by the peaceful burial place with its majestic kin, stowed in the woods where nothing but the whispers of the wind can be heard.”
In Anna Karenina, the co-protagonist of the novel, Konstantin Levin wakes one morning and decides to run away from his thoughts and the troubles of life by farming with the peasants. The figurative meaning behind that scene is based on active movement, an inner feeling that relies on love of manual labor and community, de-stressing the mind through strenuous physical activity. The aesthetic of movement and synchroneity in the wide green landscape created a sort of musical lyricism within the text; the voices of the peasants, their whispers and calls resembling old folk songs or hymns. Sophia Tolstoy, the novelist’s wife, recalls that the musical scene was based on a real event that the novelist and his family experienced as they were participating in the peasants’ harvest.
The most expressive testaments in painting a portrait of the scene will remain Ilya Repin’s, who is one of the most renowned Russian realist painters. Repin says: Tolstoy is strangely passionate. I would watch him work endlessly in the fields. He would come and go through his field from one in the afternoon, till eight in the evening, directing the horse-led ploughs, with another horse prepping the ground ahead of him. He would be sweating bullets, and his thick rags would be soaked with sweat. The fatigue and stress from going uphill were evident on his yellowish face and his sweaty strands that stuck to his cheeks and forehead, and despite that, his face would light up and he would greet me with a joke whenever he would reach me.
Despite the beauty of the scenery in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s best portrayal of trees and nature imagery lies in his novel, War and Peace. Not only is it artistically beautiful, but also thanks to its interchanging ties between humanity and nature, like man compared to tree: the tree’s external form and aesthetic value is only a reflection of the internal condition of man himself.
One of the most popular characters in War and Peace is prince Andrei Bolkonsky. Destroyed and depressed after his return from the Third Coalition war, he pays a special visit to a nobleman. Spring has sprung and flourished, and trees and greenery blossomed, beautifying the roads, but there was one exception: an old, gnarled oak tree that stood tall by the side of the road. It was larger than any of the other trees; so large that it would need two people only to wrap around its trunk. The oak tree’s branches were broken, and it was covered with old ‘scars’. Its large branches resembled huge clumsy arms with long outstretched fingers in an asymmetrical appearance which made it stand starkly between the flourished and cheerful birch trees, like an angry, resentful old man, the only one refusing to surrender its will to the new year’s sunny spring.
“Spring, love, happiness!” this oak seemed to say. “Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and always a fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! Look at those cramped dead firs, ever the same, and at me too, sticking out my broken and barked fingers just where they have grown, whether from my back or my sides: as they have grown so I stand, and I do not believe in your hopes and your lies.”
Prince Andrei turns his head to it, as if in anticipation, and in its shadow a blend of grass and blossoming flowers while it stands tall and dreary, a monstrous beast it was:
“But we know life— our life is over! Like that oak.”
A soul that is lost and broken is only able to view other beings as a reflection of itself. Even if that oak is nothing but a visual metaphor for beauty, the shattered soul will see nothingness.
Days after seeing the tree, Prince Andrei decided to return on the same path in search of the oak that shared his views. Except this time, he was in a different spiritual state than the last time. He wanted to see the tree again, after the gates of life opened to his soul. But where was that oak tree? He found it, but its image was not the dark and gloomy one that he encountered the last time, the bitter aggression it displayed was no longer, and leaves were blossoming and full of life. He wondered: how could that mortal old tree do that? It is life! He was watching the oak tree in a different spiritual state. Love and life crept into his heart, and those springs burst forth and everything he saw, the soul and the trees, blossomed.
This transitional stage from a dull life to one that bursts with liveliness is not an exception. It happens by chance when it is least expected. Only when man finally discovers what he was missing, everything that called for death and misery is donning a new skin, calling for an invitation to a new life. Or it happens when one loses sight of what is right in front of them, without any expectations.
I can picture the philosopher Baruch Spinosa in his last journey from the house he grew up in after his expulsion and shunning by the Jewish congregation. As he left the place he called his home, he watched a harmonious collection of flowers and roses planted by some houses. He would limp back home every evening by that same trail, but he had never noticed the fragrant and colorful flowers before. In his final time, the trail presented itself differently. Colors, scents, and shapes that force their way into your heart like a love letter to life. He wondered in confusion: how did this never catch his sight before? Did it always look this way? Has he simply never noticed it? Certainly, that is life, as it always will be; seldom revealing its beauty except for when you are on the verge of losing it.
He looked forward to the harmonious collection of flowers, stunning as the morning rain left dew drops on the petals. What really caught his attention was within the shadows of the nearing bushes; it was a big red rose. The petals on the right dimmed by the shadows, whereas the other side was vividly bright, it was like the rose was dual-colored non-existent in any other place than that exact spot in the moment. He pushed the bushes aside to look closely at the brilliant, isolated rose, but just as he nudged it, the sunlight reflected on his eyes, like it was talking to him, Spinosa has never been enticed by the color red before… or that is what he thought, but as soon as he looked at the divine creation, it was like a spark lit in his soul. He was not seeing a flower anymore, within those petals, he saw Clara Maria’s lips. Clara was Franciscus Van Den Enden’s daughter, and she taught him Latin, and Terence’s plays at her father’s house. One day, Baruch Spinosa mispronounced a word, so Clara smiled sweetly at him, it was from that moment that his heart burst for her. He had never loved a woman before, especially not a woman that could stand against men like him in her knowledge and brains. Such a smile, and such a mind, was an inescapable exception. He extended his hand towards the flowerpot to smell it and kiss the brilliant red petals. The scent of that flower was the last smell he stored in his memory of that place. His fingertips brushed lightly against the velvety petals, like he was touching that woman, Clara Maria. He was touching a beautiful flower, but his soul was elsewhere, in that exact moment where Clara smiled at him. He wanted to pluck the flower to take it along with him, it would have been great memorabilia. His hands were ready to pluck but one thing stopped him, the flower had his mother’s name: Hannah.
The German poet Rilke has a poem titled Autumn. It holds such poetic imagery that it expands to engulf the entire world. It starts with the autumn leaves falling, just like death, it includes both trees and humans. It ends with the one that holds all the world in his hands, God, in all his majesty and grace.
The leaves fall, fall as from far,
Like distant gardens withered in the heavens;
They fall with slow and lingering descent.
And in the nights the heavy Earth, too, falls
From out the stars into the Solitude.
Thus, all doth fall. This hand of mine must fall
And lo! the other one: —it is the law.
But there is One who holds this falling
Infinitely softly in His hands.
T1676
