Scary moments as the nights start to draw in
thought: “I would go mad with depression...But this year it will be different.”
He intends his journal to be “a torch raised against it... I will embrace this winter like a summer”. This brave resolve is soon shaken by an event of pure horror: five sheep on his elderly mother’s farm in Wales are savaged by dogs belonging to badger-baiters.
The brutal darkness of this presages a growing inner gloom. Despite his efforts to distract himself Clare finds his mood inexorably sinking: “I am fighting dark fantasies of the future... of dragging us all down.” By winter’s end his wife, a stalwart and resilient figure in t h e s e p a ge s , a g re e s : “We c a n’ t breathe,” she says.
Though Clare’s winter journey is often harsh it is filled with redemptive moments of love, conviviality and delight in the natural world. As a nature writer, he tends towards the ecstatic (“the days as bright as a magpie’s cackle”) but he is a fine observer, and the l u s h n e s s o f h i s p ro s e o f fe rs a striking contrast with the stark lineaments of the winter landscape, both physical and spiritual.
The year before keeping his journal Clare had traversed another winter landscape, tracing the footsteps of the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach, who in the winter of 1703 walked the 250odd miles from Arnstadt, where he was organist and cantor, to Lübeck, to seek out the renowned organist Dieterich Buxtehude, from whom he hoped “to comprehend one thing and another about his art”.
“Ever y long-distance walk is a p i l g r i ma g e ,” w r i t e s C l a re , wh o s e account of his journey was broadcast as part of Radio 3’s 2017 “Spirit of Bach” season. Reworked as a handsome little book, Clare’s pilgrimage has a vigour, curiosity and vivid emotional range that engagingly summons the spirit of Johann Sebastian.