My Wood
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), English essayist, novelist, biographer, and literary critic, wrote veral notable works of fiction dealing with the constricting effects of social and national conventions upon human relationships. The novels include A Room with a View(1908), Howards End(1910), and A Passage to India (1924). In addition, his lectures on fiction, collected as Aspects of the Novel雪字草书 (1927), remain graceful elucidations of the genre. In “My Wood” taken from his essay collection Abinger Harvest(1936), Forster writes with wit and wisdom about effect of property upon human behavior---notably his own.
A few years ago I wrote a book which dealt with in part with the difficulties of the English in India. Feeling that they would have had no difficulties in India themlves, Americans read the book freely. The more they read it the better it made them feel, and a cheque to the author was the result. I bought a wood with the cheque. It is not a large wood----it contains scarcely any trees, and it is intercted, blast it by a public footpath. Still, it is the first prope
rty that I have owned, so it is right that other people should participate in my shame, and should ask themlves, in accents that will vary in horror, this very important question: What is the effect upon the character? Don’t let’s touch the economics; the effect of private ownership upon the community as a whole is another question----a more important question, perhaps, but another one. Let’s keep to psychology. If you own things, what’s their effect on you? What’s the effect on me of my wood?
In the first place, it makes me feel heavy. Property does have this effect. Property produces men of weight, and it was a man of weight who failed to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. He was not wicked, that unfortunate millionaire in the parable, he was only stout; he stuck out in front, not to mention behind, and as he wedged himlf this way and that in the crystalline entrance and bruid his well-fed flanks, he saw beneath him a comparatively slim camel passing through the eye of a needle and being woven into the robe of God. The Gospels all through couple stoutness and slowness. They point out what is perfectly obvious, yet ldom realized: that if you have a lot of things you cannot move about a lot, that furniture requires dusting, dusters require rvants, rvants requir
e insurance stamps, and the whole tangle of them makes you think twice before you accept an invitation to dinner or go for a bathe in the Jordan. Sometimes the Gospels proceed further and say with Tolstoy that property is sinful; they approach the difficult ground of asceticism here, where I cannot follow them. But as to the immediate effects of property on people, they just show straightforward logic. It produces men of weight. Men of weight cannot, by definition, move like the lightning from the East unto the West, and the ascent of a fourteen-stone bishop into a pulpit is thus the exact antithesis of the coming of the Son of Man. My wood makes me feel heavy.属虎的人性格
In the cond place, it makes me feel it ought to be larger.
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The other day I heard a twig snap in it. I was annoyed at first, for I thought that someone was blackberrying, and depreciating the value of the undergrowth. On coming nearer, I saw it was not a man who had trodden on the twig and snapped it, but a bird, and I felt plead. My bird. The bird was not equally plead. Ignoring the relation between us, it took fright as soon as it saw the shape of my face, and flew straight over the boundary he右手边>大理旅游
dge into field, the property of Mrs. Henessy’s bird. Something emed grossly amiss here, something that would not have occurred had the wood been larger. I could not afford to buy Mrs. Henessy out, I dared not murder her, and limitations of this sort bet me on every side. Ahab did not want that vineyard---he only needed it to round off his property, preparatory to plotting a new curve---and all the land around my wood has become necessary to me in order to round off the wood. A boundary protects. But ----poor little things---the boundary in its turn to be protected. Nois on the edge of it. Children throw stones. A little more, and then a little more, until we reach the a. Happy Canute! Happier Alexander! And after all, why should even the world be the limit of posssion? A rocket containing a Union Jack, will, it is hoped, be shortly fired at the moon. Mars Sirius. Beyond which…But the immensities ended by saddening me. I could not suppo that my wood was destined nucleus of universal dominion---it is so very small and contains no mineral wealth beyond the blackberries. Nor was I comforted when Mrs. Henessy’s bird took alarm for the cond time and flew clean away from us all, under the belief that it belonged to itlf.
In the third place, property makes its owner feel that he ought to do something to it. Yet he isn’t sure what. A restlessness comes over him, a vague n that he has a personality to express---the same n which, without any vagueness, leads the artist to an act of creation. Sometimes I think I will cut down such trees as remain in the wood, at other times I want to fill up the gaps between them with new trees. Both impuls are pretentious and empty. They are not honest movements towards money-making or beauty. They spring from a foolish desire to express mylf and from an inability to enjoy what I have got. Creation, property, enjoyment form a sinister trinity in the human mind. Creation and enjoyment are both very, very good, yet they are often unattainable without a material basis, and at such moments property pushes itlf in as a substitute, saying, “Accept me instead---I’m good enough for all three.” It is not enough. It is, as Shakespeare said of lust, “The expen or spirit in a waste of shame”: it is “Before, a joy propod; behind, a dream.” Yet we don’t know how to shun it. It is forced on us by our economic system as the alternative to starvation. It is also forced on us by an internal defect in the soul, by the feeling that in property may lie the germs of lf-development an
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d of exquisite or heroic deeds. Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal! But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership, where (in the words of Dante) “Posssion is one with loss.”
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And this brings us to our fourth and final point: the blackberries.
Blackberries are not plentiful in this meager grove, but they are easily en from the public footpath which travers it, and all too easily gathered. Foxgroves, too---people pull up the foxgroves, and ladies of an educational tendency even grub for toadstools to show them on the Monday in class. Other ladies, less educated, roll down the bracken in the arms of their gentlemen friends. There is paper, there are tins. Pray, does my wood belong to me or doesn’t it? And, if it does, should I not own it best by allowing no one el to walk there? There is a wood near Lyme Regis, also curd by a public footpath, where the owner has not hesitated on this point. He has built high stone walls each side of the path, and has spanned it by bridges, so that the public circulate like termites while he gor
ges on the blackberries unen. He really does own his wood, this able chap. Dives in Hell did pretty well, but the gulf dividing him from lazarus could be traved by vision, and nothing travers it here. And perhaps I shall come to this in time. I shall wall in and fence out until I really taste the sweets of property. Enormously stout, endlessly avaricious, pudo-creative, intenly lfish, I shall weave upon my forehead the quadruple crown of posssion until tho nasty Bolshies come and take it off again and thrust me aside into the outer darkness.
