“There are freedoms in woods that our ancestors perhaps realized more fully than we do. . . . This is the main reason I see trees, the wood, as the best analogue of prose fiction. All novels are also, in some way, exercises in attaining freedom—even when, at an extreme, they deny the possibility of its existence. Some such process of retreat from the normal world—however much the theme and surface is to be of the normal world—is inherent in any act of artistic creation, let alone that specific kind of writing that deals in imaginary situations and characters. And a part of that retreat must always be into a ‘wild’, or ordinarily repressed and socially hidden, self: into a place always a complexity beyond reality, never fully comprehensible or explicable, always more potential than realized; yet where no one will ever penetrate as far as we have” (from John Fowles, The Tree, pp. 75-6.)
Arborilegium 