Some New Year’s Resolutions for the inauspicious year of 1984, published in The Times on 31 December 1983:

‘My resolve for 1984 is to suffer wtih saintly equanimity the great irritations of our time: the cult of the ugly, the jargon of the fashionable and the assaults of bureaucracy.’ — William Trevor, writer

‘I hope that Roland Rat’s contribution to English literature and drama is recognised for what it really is.’ — Greg Dyke, editor-in-chief of TV-am

‘I hope that 1984 will not prove the sombre year it promises to be – that the people of inhumanity, aggression and barbarism, of confrontation and conflict, of totalitarian desires and a will to instability, will not dominate, and some sense of an end-of-the-century promise will begin to emerge … May we have imagination instead of politics, aspiration instead of history. A pretty vain hope, I think.’ – Malcolm Bradbury, novelist

‘My first good resolution is to accept the process of forgetting things as inevitable and even healthy. After all, in the end we forget everything.’ — William Golding, novelist

‘If the whole world could just be nice to each other for a year I’d be happy.’ — Floella Benjamin, presenter of Playschool

‘Resolutions: zero. Hopes: zero.’ — Samuel Beckett, playwright

I wrote this review of two books about lighthouses — Tom Nancollas’s Seashaken Houses and R.G. Grant’s Sentinels of the Sea — for the TLS.

As lighthouses fade into obsolescence, literature about lighthouses flourishes. In a crowded field, both these books succeed in adding something valuable and different. Despite its subtitle, Seashaken Houses is more of a personal journey and meditative essay than a conventional history. Tom Nancollas has visited seven rock lighthouses in Britain and Ireland, from the relative tameness of Perch Rock on New Brighton beach to the godforsakenness of Fastnet, Ireland’s most southerly point, where he spends a week with engineers on a maintenance visit.

His accounts of these journeys, and his dealings along the way with boat skippers and owners of decommissioned lighthouses, are the best thing in the book. One chapter, in which Nancollas sails out to Bell Rock, eleven miles off Arbroath, shows vividly how a mere photograph could never capture the monumentalism of a rock lighthouse. As the boat gets closer, he writes, the tower “grows out of the horizon in stages, like a shoot in soil … details coalesce as the lighthouse produces larger versions of itself”. Throughout the book, Nancollas manages to convey a rock lighthouse’s utter unlikeliness – the way that it seems, on its mostly submerged reef, to rise up so unfeasibly out of the water, a heroic human conquering of gravity, wave power and the elements.

A building conservationist by training, Nancollas is expert on the construction and weathering of these unique buildings. But mainly he is interested in their symbolism, how their “noble simplicity of purpose” masks myriad ambiguities. Lighthouses, he writes, “stand between land and sea, strength and fragility, the defined and the undefined, the mythical and the real”. And their existence is inherently paradoxical, for “there can be few other buildings designed expressly to repel, to emphatically not be seen at close quarters”.

Nancollas has a good ear for quotation (the book’s inspired title comes from a Dylan Thomas poem) and is a watchful and meticulous writer himself. His description of the “requisite perfection” of a lighthouse is just right; on a rock far out to sea, economy of line and exquisite engineering are a matter of pure necessity. The book is filled with such well-fitting phrases. Nancollas describes his attempt to reimagine the lives of the light keepers as “stepping into the curvature of their lives” – for even their beds were curved to fit the rounded walls. He has some nicely eerie depictions of abandoned lighthouses, their windows fogged with saline residue and their floors flaked with peeled paint.

The parts of the book dealing with the history of lighthouses are less compelling, and seem tonally cut off from the first-person segments. Stories about John Smeaton’s success in taming the Eddystone Rock in the 1750s, and Augustin Fresnel’s refinement of lighthouse lenses, feel like well-trodden ground.

These stories also get retold in Sentinels of the Sea, along with other familiar ones about the Lighthouse Stevensons and the Longstone lighthouse heroine, Grace Darling. Not that R.G. Grant’s text, a compact global history of lighthouses from the Pharos of Alexandria onwards, isn’t interesting. We learn how impoverished coastal communities opposed the building of lighthouses, for they viewed the plundering of wrecked ships as “God’s bounty to the poor”. And there is much absorbing detail about the engineering virtuosity that balanced towers on tiny rocks, and about the lonesome vigils of the light keepers.

But Sentinels of the Sea is worth possessing mainly because it is, like the buildings it commemorates, a beautiful object. The book’s 408 illustrations, many in colour, wed beautifully with its words. It has been produced in association with the National Archives at Kew and they have done a great job of sourcing images everywhere from coast guard’s records to maritime museum archives. On every other page there is some arresting picture – of light keepers’ implements, of architects’ floor plans, cross-sections and elevations, or of rock lights lashed by waves. “Miscellany” is right: this is a book to dip into and return to.

Both these books have a valedictory air – in recognition that, in the age of radar and satellite navigation, working lighthouses may not be long for this world. But then, as Grant points out, the lighthouse has been in long decline since the 1920s, when radios and radio beacons arrived, reducing the central importance of foghorns and beams of light. Ever since, lighthouses may have benefited from a wave of technical innovations begun in other fields – telephones, radios, electric motors, radar, GPS – but they have long since ceased to drive such innovation themselves. Britain’s last occupied lighthouse was automated at the end of the last millennium. The valedictories are overdue.

The lighthouse lovers who will be drawn to these books will not mind that the melancholy is a little oversold. For the bare facts don’t register the endless suggestiveness of these buildings as metaphors for human isolation and connection. As Nancollas puts it, rock lights in particular “emit an unprejudiced message of fellowship” and “generosity of spirit”. Even if we know in our heads that they will soon be little more than concrete follies, they feel in our hearts like our common humanity made solid. Their beacons turn and blink eternally because we accept that strangers lost at sea are also worthy of our care and concern, even if we just flash our lights at them in the dark.

Photo of Perch Rock Lighthouse, New Brighton, copyright Graham Robson and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons.

There are some great sentences in Luis Sagasti’s Fireflies (Charco Press), a lyrical, fragmentary essay on human life and history:

The world is a ball of wool. A skein of yarn you can’t find the end of.

Conspiracy theories. An explanation that arises from intellectual laziness: the idea that a shadowy group has chosen to weave the plots of all of our lives.

The darkest dark and the whitest light are equally blinding.

Computer software automatically corrects mistyped words. The words have locks. Cyberspace is smooth and uniform. There are no cracks in the surface: we only find what we are looking for.

One night Wittgenstein enters enemy territory and lights a cigarette (probably the last one he smoked in his life). It is well known that you can take three puffs before a soldier blows your brains out: by the third drag the enemy has taken aim, and is ready to fire at the glowing point in the dark.

Everything tends to be slower in the cold, until it reaches the most crystalline stillness, which is why people walk faster. The breath that freezes as soon as it leaves his mouth, the raw material with which the tongue forms words, or whatever remains of language, remnants surrounded by noise.

It’s a well-known line: there are no atheists in foxholes. God, like fireflies, only shines in the darkness, wrote Schopenhauer. In the trenches, the only light is that of enemy fire. Up there in space, where the darkness is total, travelling at over 16,500 miles per hour in a tiny craft that will reach a temperature of 1,000 degrees Celsius when it re-enters the atmosphere, with no computer to control the descent, Yuri Gagarin declares, without ceremony, in a firm voice despite being curled up in a near-foetal position, I see no God up here. That’s what you call having balls.

No animal gazes at the sky. That’s why the sky, according to the shamans, is always full of animals.

I wrote this for the Times Higher last week.

In his essay, “The passing wisdom of birds”, the nature writer Barry Lopez advocates that every university establish the post of in-house naturalist, to be held in rotation by a student in his or her final year. The university naturalist would record the flora and nonhuman fauna of the campus and advise about how best to look after them. He or she would be like a university archivist, but of the outdoors.

Although I’m not a student, I should like to apply for this position. As a university naturalist I am, in CV-speak, a dynamic self-starter with a strong skill set. I’m also good at looking out of windows and spotting the seasonal shifts: like the arrival of winter on campus, with the first frost on the path and the squirrels hoarding beechmast and berries.

I teach in a building that backs on to a garden full of London plane trees. Outside one of my classrooms, there is a tree so close that you can reach out the window and almost touch its branches. The London plane is the perfect urban tree for our urban university: its knobbly bark and leathery leaves hoover up polluted air. It also sends out an early signal of autumn, shedding leaves even before Michaelmas. Yet the sheltering wall of our building – and, presumably, global warming – has, for this particular tree, held back the full force of the fall. Even now, in December, a few shrivelled, yellowish leaves cling on.

I ask my first-year students to guess how many leaves that tree had when they started their course in September. Puzzled as to why their literature class has turned into nature study, they humour me and guess a thousand. Times that by at least a hundred, I say. Look. It’s been shedding leaves since induction week, and still has some left.

We are meant to be discussing Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shakespeare never set eyes on a London plane, which is a late 17th-century hybrid. But he knew his trees, and lived in a world where they were vital – for making ships, houses, furniture, books. And while teaching the sonnets this year, something obvious has dawned on me. Shakespeare doesn’t really think in seasons, which are a human construct anyway. He thinks in micro-seasons, subtly blurring into each other.

“That time of year thou may’st in me behold,” Sonnet 73 begins, “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang”. I used to think that second line was just lazily fixing up the metre, but now I love its self-cancelling order and the way it catches a precise stage of late autumn moving into early winter. Leaves in the sonnets have many states, depending on the micro-season. They are “lusty”, “fair”, “vacant”, “barren”, or “look pale, dreading the winter’s near”. And then they are gone, replaced by “old December’s bareness everywhere”.

This year, I have noticed the micro-seasons myself, perhaps because I have suddenly felt part of what the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie calls “that rough tribe of the mortal”. And it’s not just other people who seem fragile and vulnerable. Nature feels vulnerable too, and every moment of autumn has felt like an exquisite death, a bereavement.

I’ve noted it all as the light in this afternoon seminar has slowly dimmed: the first swallows gathering on the telephone wires before their journey south; the first heavy dewfall; the first air from the Arctic; the first buzz of the gardeners’ leaf blowers in November. Meanwhile, the demands of term-time have felt more than ever like a perpetual juggernaut that acknowledges neither the seasons nor the particularity of individual lives.

Trees, our longest-living organisms, fool us into thinking that things are permanent. Alone among plants, they raise a wooden scaffolding above the ground – building, in annual increments, a frame on which to hang their leaves, while their heartwood grows hard in death and serves as a backbone. In winter, when so many other things are absent or dead, their leafless skeletons stand proud and, seemingly, immortal.

But people aren’t as sturdy as trees. As Shakespeare reminds us in the sonnets, they are more like leaves, waiting on winter. Each human life burns itself out, is “consum’d with that which it was nourished by”.

For the students – I hope – autumn is what it used to be for me: a new start, a second spring, what the French call la rentrée . Long may they feel cocooned in this illusion of continuity, that there will always be another semester, that life will go on as before.

You have to be ready to notice things – in literature as in life. When you do, they are right there in front of you, hidden in plain sight. And now life just seems too short and precious not to notice every falling leaf.