Jay Griffiths
Jay Griffiths
Jay Griffithsis an award-winning British writer and author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Anarchipelago, A Love Letter from a Stray Moon and Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionAuthor
children silence unhappy
Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.
grace timing individual
Time is found in the calibration of the individual to the timing of a collective endeavour, the social grace that less clock-bound societies must practise.
opposites measurement facts
Clock measurement is not time itself. In fact, so opposed are they that one could argue the clock is not a synonym, but the opposite of time.
heretic
Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.
subjects wild-creatures creatures
A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own
medicine tree mind
The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.
space needs branches
Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.
cat animal play
Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.
hate light shining
All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.
ocean blue whales
Cultures have long heard wisdom in non-human voices: Apollo, god of music, medicine and knowledge, came to Delphi in the form of a dolphin. But dolphins, which fill the oceans with blipping and chirping, and whales, which mew and caw in ultramarine jazz - a true rhapsody in blue - are hunted to the edge of silence.
loss silence mind
The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.
ice-water air fire
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.