Out of his shell

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, by Roger Deakin, edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker

The writer, Robert Macfarlane, said of his friend, Roger Deakin, that everything Deakin had ever said tended ‘towards diffidence, an abrogation of the self’. It was a fierce verdict. Not a denial of the self or even a suppression of it but an abrogation, an annulment or cancellation of who he was. Macfarlane meant it as no criticism. He loved and even revered Deakin and Deakin, by his own account, replied, quoting Keats that ‘We should rather be the flower than the bee’, that the recipient, the quietist, whose governing quality was an alert passivity, was the man of virtue.

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This collection from Deakin’s notebooks over the last six years of his life — he died in 2006 — is a tribute to that frame of mind.