Originally published in The King’s Journal, Winter 2023.

Winter is surely the strangest and most magical season: the vivid frosty mornings, the stratus giants watching over the day, the long mysterious nights, the sleet, the fog, the possibility of snow. Most people seem to regard such weather as grim, dreaming instead of a lifetime of sunshine and ice-cream — and once I would have been among them. But some years ago I discovered that it was possible to enjoy weather in all its forms.

This conversion was caused, I think, by reading rather than direct experience. I read the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote…”) and was struck by the beauty of spring. I read Robinson Crusoe and was thrilled by the way the shipwrecked Crusoe had to adapt himself to the climate of the island. I read the first two novels of C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and found myself enchanted by the ways in which Lewis, a master of description, imagined the Edenic atmosphere of foreign planets. Then returning to the real world, I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the cyclical change of seasons, the sense that life should not be the same all year round, that there is a process of which we are part, and by which we are humbled. Reading good books often has this effect: come the end, I feel like I have returned home having travelled far, and am much better for it.

I revere storms most of all, both out of love and fear. The American pilot William Rankin was one of the few men to fall through a thunderstorm cloud and survive, and he later wrote about his experience:

I had been looking up in the direction of my ‘chute, when a bolt of lightning struck, illuminating the huge interior of the ‘chute’s billow as though it were a strange white-domed cathedral, and the effect seemed to linger on the retinas of my eyes. For a moment, I had the distinct feeling that I was sailing into a softly lit church and at any moment I might hear the subdued strains of an organ and a mournful voice in prayer—and I thought I had died.

Could any experience have been more frightening, yet more wonderful? A storm insults, beats and devastates us, and is all the while sublime; and afterwards the plants rise up with greater strength, and nature often celebrates with glorious smells and tantalising rainbows.

The weather is the opposite of the modern techno-progressive world: it doesn’t move relentlessly forward but rather moves in circles. It goes and returns; it lives and dies and relives. Yes, I resent aspects of the weather as much as anyone else; like nearly everything in nature it thwarts selfishness. It doesn’t care about your projects, your “me time”, your appointments, your social engagements. It reminds us that we are not above or separate from the natural world. But once we realise this and adapt ourselves to it, most weather can be endured and even enjoyed.

Lately I have been reading two writers in tandem: John Ruskin and Paul Kingsnorth. They seem to complement each other. Kingsnorth is a sort of twenty-first century Ruskin. Both began their public lives in specific fields – Ruskin art, Kingsnorth environmentalism – and over time began to explore the broader implications of the values they were cultivating in these fields. Politically they almost mirror each other. To the extent that left-right labels are at all useful, Kingsnorth’s journey is more left to right, while Ruskin’s was more right to left. But both in essence converge on the same point, which is neither right nor left, and which is in opposition to what Kingsnorth and others call the Machine: an autonomous force of technological advance, which has no interest in culture, nature, and soul.

While Ruskin argued brilliantly for systemic change, Kingsnorth has become more pessimistic and reluctant. A “recovering environmentalist”, he has given up on activism. Unlike some other political “converts”, he did not suddenly discover a love of fossil fuels. His views on climate disaster did not change, but rather he lost faith in the solutions; he believes they would only further feed the Machine by continuing the industrialisation of what is left of the natural world in the name of sustainability. Kingsnorth does not want to sustain our current way of life. He wants something much more radical – something he himself has done. He wants to withdraw.

“[People] will tell you,” Kingsnorth writes, “that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that ‘fighting’ is always better than ‘quitting’. Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. … All real change starts with withdrawal.” By withdrawing we can better discern what is right and good, rediscover “appropriate technology”, learn again to love nature for its own sake, and wait for the Machine to burn itself out so that we can return to something older and better. “None of it is going to save the world,” writes Kingsnorth gloomily, “but then there is no saving the world, and the ones who say there is are the ones you need to save it from.”

The radical and the reactionary are commonly thought of as polar opposites, but often the two go hand-in-hand. Many are unaware that Ruskin, so essential an influence on early socialist movements, was a self-confessed “violent Tory of the old school”. He did not want to steer what was then called “Political Economy” in another direction, like some of his radical contemporaries. Nor did he want to adapt to it like the then newly-formed Conservatives. Rather, he opposed it as a narrow and incomplete view of the world. Like many of his most imaginative contemporaries, he was attracted to an older and somewhat Medieval worldview; he was never particularly excited by the glittering inventions and transformative promises of the Machine. For Ruskin, famously, “there is no wealth but life” – an idea so captivatingly true and so beautifully expressed that one could almost spend a lifetime contemplating it.

In the modern world “life” usually refers to the individual’s journey from cradle to grave, but Ruskin meant the term in opposition to this self-interested approach; he was referring to communal and societal flourishing. I would go further and take “life” to mean more than just human wellbeing. It is wrong how in the modern mind humanity and nature (that is, everything else) are increasingly considered as two separate spheres. We have “green spaces” that are separate from most of daily life. We close ourselves within four walls and when an insect manages somehow to find its way in, we often kill it. So much of our architecture and technology seems to be designed not to complement nature, but in ugly defiance of the natural world. We build communities of concrete, brick and tarmac, where the wild world is only found trying to fight its way through the cracks or, with animals, rummaging through the heaps of things we discard. As we become more technological we push nature even farther away. It is something to visit, or else something that inconveniences us, that we must overcome. It is another world that sometimes intrudes on our own, a world we have sought to colonise, setting its limits and its usefulness according to our desires.

When I see a hill I see something more beautiful – more exciting – than anything Silicon Valley could create. When I see and hear a bird I am struck by how much more wonderful it is, to an infinite degree, than anything synthesised by the screens and amplifiers we have made. All our noisy, polluting creations are never as thrilling as the things they destroy – from silence to the night sky, from forests to the contemplative faculty within all of us. There is no wealth but life. And when we make sovereign any other kind of wealth, we surely begin on a path whose final destination is the destruction of life.