Illness brings back a buried childhood
His present life fell away while scenes from sixty years before replayed in detail. He wrote the book to set down that returned childhood before it faded again.
Far Away and Long Ago
4 ideas
A child's untaught animism toward nature
Hudson describes a feeling he had as a boy that trees, moonlit flowers and lonely places held a watching presence. It stirred both awe and fear, and nobody had taught it to him. He treats this sense of the supernatural in nature as a primitive faculty that arises on its own in a child steeped in wild surroundings, before religion or education shape it.
Everyday violence shapes a child's moral sense
He records how routine blood was in that world, and the revulsion he himself came to feel toward it. He shows a child's attitude to cruelty forming against the customs around him, not simply absorbing them.
Memoir as elegy for vanished landscape
Writing from London about grasslands he never saw again, Hudson describes the pampas birds, animals and open plains as a world that settlement and cultivation have since transformed. Read this way, the naturalist's close description of a childhood landscape also serves as a record of an ecosystem that no longer exists as it was.