miscellany

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them …

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. …

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.*

In May 2003, when it was evident that the then [Telegraph Media Group (!?)] proprietor Lord Black of Crossharbour was at odds with other shareholders in his master company, Hollinger International, Sir David sent a fax from Monte Carlo which said simply: “I wish to register our interest should you contemplate any serious change in your UK interests”; to which Black replied: “Conditions are quite manageable. No assets are for sale.”

By November of that year, however, Black’s position was more vulnerable, and secret negotiations with Sir David began. A deal was struck …*

Sir David had an astute grasp of the political landscape and one friend recalled that he was “able to read the economic ‘tea-leaves’ like few people of his generation”. But as newspaper proprietors, it had always been the brothers’ policy to intervene barely at all in editorial decisions – though their editors knew that they supported Margaret Thatcher’s enthusiasm for small government, free markets, lower taxes, wealth creation and providing the means of social mobility to everyone.*