NEW BOREHAM BOOKS
Supply of Vitality
One of the reasons why F W Boreham wrote passionately about nature was because of nature’s capacity to exude life in a full and endless supply. Inviting readers to share his exultation of life at Wedge Bay, Boreham wrote:"He will find himself in a world that is simply overflowing with life. He will be bewildered by its teeming abundance, its confusing multiplicity, its endless prodigality. He will find life, in every possible and impossible phase and form, swarming and scurrying, flapping and fluttering, rustling and crawling, whispering and twittering, bounding and splashing, everywhere and all the time! He will see life peeping forth from every crack and crevice. Life is breaking out and bursting up and bubbling over everywhere ... If they really want to see life, let them go to Wedge Bay!"[1]
Marvel of Spring
The experience of life in its essential form was never more evident for Boreham than in Spring. “However commonplace the year might be”. he told his southern hemisphere readers, “[September] holds for each of us one month of marvels”.[2] Saluting this season as “the sweet o’ the year”, Boreham continued: “The gladness of Springtime is the sheer joy of being alive. The assumption is sound. The rapture and intentness with which we watch the return of the swallows, the gilding of the wattle, the bursting of the bulbs. The vernal roaming of the elms, the oaks and the poplars, and all the familiar signs of the passing of Winter and the approach of summer days, is simply an integral phase of our passionate love of living”.[3]
Joy of Life
Boreham’s love of life and his views about Spring were shaped by Richard Jeffries. “Nobody has written with more precision on the subject of Spring”, declared Boreham, “than has Richard Jefferies”.[4] Boreham shared Jeffries’ ecstasy in waiting for the coming of Spring. The naturalist was fascinated by “the joy of life” and his love of Spring was “not so much for its own sake, as for the sake of the life that the Spring so abundantly produces”.[5]
Geoff Pound
Image: “the coming of Spring”
[1] Boreham, The golden milestone, 114.
[2] Boreham, Mercury, 2 November 1946.
[3] Boreham, Mercury, 3 September 1949.
[4] Boreham, Mercury, 2 November 1946.
[5] Boreham, Mercury, 2 November 1946.