Fluttering bits of life
Readings from Durham Book Festival | The Scottish Poetry Library | Sage Gateshead
Audience members at each of the A Year in Beadnell events (An Hour in Beadnell: a mixed-media performance) contributed to a moving reading of the “Monarch Letter”, which appears below.
September 10, 1963
Durham Book Festival, September 2015
Dear One,
Scottish Poetry Library, April 2016
This is a postscript to our morning at Newagen, something I think I can write better than say. For me it was one of the loveliest of the summer’s hours, and all the details will remain in my memory: that blue September sky, the sounds of the wind in the spruces and surf on the rocks, the gulls busy with their foraging, alighting with deliberate grace, the distant views of Griffiths Head and Todd Point, today so clearly etched, though once half seen in swirling fog. But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force. We talked a little about their migration, their life history. Did they return? We thought not; for most, at least, this was the closing journey of their lives.
Sage Gateshead, June 2016
But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly – for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural.
Durham Book Festival, September 2015
For the Monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to an end.
Scottish Poetry Library, April 2016
That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found a deep happiness in it – so I hope, may you. Thank you for this morning.
Rachel
Writing the Letter
Rachel Carson had a friendship with Dorothy Freeman who was her neighbour in Maine. Freeman, who like her friend, was passionate about the natural world had contacted Carson upon hearing the scientist and writer was to summer in the house next to hers. From that early meeting in the Fifties the two women began a correspondence of profound significance in both their lives. Letters followed a system of address: “Pears” being for family consumption – Freeman was married with children – and “Apples” folded, private missives meant only for the eyes of the other woman. Not long before Carson’s death the two women burned a selection of their letters. What remains, a vast collection, has been edited by Freeman’s daughter Martha and published in the mid-1990s.
This letter was written by Carson to Freeman on her last full day in Maine in the summer of 1963. That morning, the two of them sat on the west lawn of the Newagen Inn on the coast of Maine as Rachel’s declining health forced her to consider her own mortality.