I need a short formula of words for topical application, when the shocks, as they will, come, and then, after I have stuck the jag into the vein, I can retire from panic into calm and listen to, or maybe even read, the longer reaches of words that lie in books and keep on seeking the way best to live.

It is Sunday now. The necessary words may have been there all along.

Cymbeline is an odd late play made of parts that fit together but roughly, some sophisticated, some simple. It contains lines to which people return because sadness has never been so consolingly expressed in spite of the dislocating oddness of the actual scene in which the lines are spoken.

‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages,

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.’

The refrain brings pollen, soot, dust to life as the atoms to which we all come. It begins with sun and ends in dust; it is astral physics in poetic form, in a couplet. Two lines of English verse then tell us we are children of the sun, and made, all of us, of sun and dust. That black chimney where the sweeps work is where we are caught in life, even golden lads and girls. There is a view of the sun from the constraining dusty black. Some few are for a time out in the sun. All come to dust.

‘Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney sweepers, come to dust.’

But it’s not those lines that I have been keeping by me, against such a demand as I’m presently making for a prophylactic line, so much as those mysterious words,

‘Hang there like fruit, my soul,

Till the tree die.’

I have loved them for years, and do not know what they mean. Or, they may be made to mean a number of things. They are not imprecise. They speak whereof most of us had best not try to speak or it will be wind and piss. The impression they make breathes out from within them like sea from inside a chambered shell. They express a great perhaps. These were Rabelais’s, almost too perfectly conclusive, last words: ‘I am in search of a great perhaps.’

The circumstances in which this line and a half is spoken, by Posthumus to his estranged wife Imogen, are not, nor can ever be, comparable to what has happened between Fram and myself. For us there is no return to what was before. Neither present truth nor passed time permit. Our separation may have been based upon a misunderstanding, but the misunderstanding was all mine.

I wish that these lines, which I have kept by me for years in case of emergency, were not spoken in circumstances like this, if it gives any impression that I dream that reconciliation of this sort may be brought about. I do not. Another sort of reconciliation, yes, but not the reconciliation of the child awaking from nightmare ‘as though it had never been’. That is for dreams, romances and plays, places where time means what the dreamer or the playwright says and not what time itself, in our reality, comes to mean. I would like to take the words out of their situational context, if I may.

Anaphylactic shock, when you break the word down, means that you are without a guard against the shock. Prophylactic means that something works as a guard. Phylax means guard.

The mysterious, literally almost pregnant, line and a half from Cymbeline slips to its stilled reader the imperative to remain living until there is no life. It is a line that is hard to break down, but by no means obscure. In logical terms, it is easy to take exception to the suggestion that fruit can be longer-lived than a tree, though that is unnecessarily literal, since what is being spoken of is not a fruit but a soul. Posthumus may be addressing his wife, or his own soul, or she may be his soul; surely all of this is intended to be within the reach of the words. The ambiguities are smoky in a play that splices ancient Britain with Renaissance Italy. The line and a bit are hard to catch. They are, like blue flowers, glimpses.

This line fumes with the negative capability that shows us what can happen when certain full notes are struck, one after another. The rock cracks and a seed is set.

What is the ‘tree’, here? Is it Posthumus, the husband, himself, addressing the wife who is clinging to him in their reunion? Is it Posthumus himself, bearer of his own soul? Is it the body? Is it life? In my prophylactic application of the line, I think that it is necessary to take the step of saying that, for my purpose, the tree might have been Fram, but it must now be the impersonal stand that is my span of life, from which I hang, perhaps as passive as a fruit but full of something even if it is only an extract from the tree. Fruit may offer consequences, from wisdom, the apple, to hospitality, the pineapple, or a periodic sentence to hell, the pomegranate.

I have to be my own tree.

Since living here on Colonsay, William has learned how to cut down a tree safely. When a tree falls, you must have the closest possible idea as to where and how it will fall. If it falls into another tree, you can only with difficulty reduce it to logs, whereas if you cut it so that it falls into a space you have already cleared, it is ready to cut up. There is also the matter of safety. A tree falls down bringing a ton weight headlong. A man working alone can be pinned and killed by a tree that will crush his ribs like those of a bird. Legislation on chainsaw work attempts to avoid this, but the chief safety is prevention. All is established by the precision of the sink-cut that must go in at forty-five degrees at the base of the chosen tree at precisely the point opposite to the direction in which you want the tree to fall.

My friend Trevor, whom I have known and respected for a generation and who is a woodsman to the ends of his branches, says that in parts of Hampshire the sink-cut is called the gob-cut. Trevor listens with such attention to trees that he would rather drive towards them than away from them. He means that he would rather be in the country than the town. In spite of this, he has sat with me in London hospital waiting rooms waiting for doctors to come and see to my various fellings. Trevor has seen it all, and his conclusion is that he would rather be outside among trees than anywhere else. He likes to read about trees. Recently, his power saw was stolen, and his toolbox. What use can those tools be to someone else? He had had that saw for twenty years and he and it had grown used to one another. He had wanted to hand that saw to his son.

This year was a big bluebell year in the woods where Trevor works. He can’t remember a year as good for bluebells. He thinks that the bluebell woods get better every year because the number of bluebell years may be melting for us all at the age we are. He does not pretend that we haven’t seen our youth away.

A tree, when it falls, brings all manner of tenants down with it. There may be birds’ nests in its branches, a marten nest in its bole, a squirrel drey in its heart, an ant city under its bark at the root, thousands of grey slaters or woodlice pouring from it, moths in chipping millions coming out like stars or dust.

If I think of my life as a tree, it is clear that I have taken, or given to myself, the gob-cut. But no one but myself is trying to fell me and I want for as long as they wish it to offer shade to my children. When I delivered that sink-cut to Fram thirteen Aprils ago, it smote him, but his roots were too strong to let go their hold and he has grown well beyond the cut and up into the canopy from where the view is clearer. His heartwood has strengthened. Arrows and longbow taken from his seasoned aim and reach hit home.

It is the last evening of the last day I am allowing myself for these eleven chapters about the year since I spoke the first part of this memoir. I intended to look clearly at why it happened, and I think I perceive two answers, one reductive and deadly and the other more open to some kind of remedial use.