A Prickly Affair, by Hugh Warwick
At a time when most of his fellow-mystics deplored this sinful world and longed to leave it, 17th-century Thomas Traherne ecstatically celebrated the world and confirmed his religious faith by observing its wonders. ‘The Ant is a great Miracle in a little room . . . its Limbs and Members are as Miraculous as those of a Lion or Tygre.’
Of late there has been an astonishing number of books that advocate this enthusiasm, this particularity — a book about the behaviour of rooks, a book about a single, nearly tame rook, even ‘conversations’ with particular trees. Now it is hedgehogs. Written too often in ‘don’t-let’s-scare-the- kiddies’ prose, these books are nevertheless serious; we have, they suggest, strayed from nature unhealthily far, suffered what one American naturalist has called ‘nature-deficit-disorder’.
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