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# 2025-05-16 - To A High Place by Teo Savory
I picked out this book from the Little Free Library. It was
published in 1972. The book jacket includes an endorsement from
"the Vietnamese poet Nhat Hanh."
> To A High Place is a novel in which a botanist named Reginald
> Elphinstone tells the story of a lady poet named Teo Savory. She
> has taken all the sufferings of her times to be her own, and one
> morning she discovered a world of dazzling pureness [and] learned
> to view this world "from a new angle." I do not think she
> discovered her wonderful world just by viewing /this/ one. She
> lives in /that/ world in the most real way, and that is why her
> eyes and her heart shine with the dazzling pureness that
> characterize her new world... I notice that once she got into the
> boat and took the oar, she found herself immediately on the other
> shore. When you look back, you are already there...
> --[Thich] Nhat Hanh
> Designed by Alan Brilliant. Typeset by Eric Smith and printed by
> Rudy Villanueva, bound by Patricia Field and Danci Mock; all by
> hand at Unicorn Press.
My kind of publishing!
> Although the novel is not based on the life of any botanist, the
> search for plants having been used symbolically, the author wishes
> to acknowledge the use of certain phrases, in the latter sections
> of the book, from the works, in particular The Rainbow Bridge and
> On the Eaves of the World by Reginald Farrer.
On The Eaves of the World, Volume 1
On The Eaves of the World, Volume 2
The Rainbow Bridge
I read this book in two sittings. I found it a beautifully pure and
poetic experience. The reading is deceptively light and easy. The
tone is whimsical yet profound. It left me dwelling on my
simultaneous sensations of the lingering sweetness of dreams and the
poignant pain of reality: the bittersweet joys and sacred
melancholies of life itself.
Spoiler warning!
The protagonist could have been a Victorian English equivalent to
Edward Scissorhands. Born disabled, his mother rejected him the hour
of his birth. None of his family accepted him, except for his sister.
Yet he kept his chin up and disregarded familial and social sleights.
Oppression rolled off him like water from a duck's back and he barely
seemed to even take notice of it.
What follows are interesting quotes from the book.
The feeling I had in France, that something had been unleashed in the
world which may not be caged again for centuries, returns to me here.
A misconception of the purpose of man (always mysterious and
obscure) has occurred--where when started one could not, without
knowing more of history than I, be able to say. But one might say
that the misconception extends to the meaning of freedom and that no
freedom, but only total destruction, will come out of the fury
blowing over this earth.
The understanding of the One--and the Many, begun in India and
continued in this high place in Tibet, leads me away ever further
from the West... Could I but build a bridge from East to West, what
spiritual riches would flow over the old Silk roads, the East India
Company's seaways; spices for the mind and heart... But I can only
make a prismed bridge, colored by poppy and primrose, iris and
gentian, and the golden rose... Or, when I find again the heavenly
gentian, send a piece of Asian sky to instruct our misty one. Here,
the base of my searched-for bridge climbs higher into the Tibetan
alps. Higher and higher I climb, as the plants do, for--Meg, do you
know?--whenever the invading foot treads over them, the plants flee
up the maintain. Poppies and asphodel which have lived at peace for
centuries with encamping priests, or roving woodcutters, or shepherds
in their season, are no longer to be seen on the screes and the
slopes I used to visit. They have fled, now, up to the very eaves of
the world, where only the mountains and the monasteries look down
from their heights of peace onto the warfare close below.
author: Savory, Teo, 1907-1989
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Teo_Savory
LOC: PZ4.S268 To PS3569.A85
tags: book,fiction,travel
title: To A High Place
# Tags
book
fiction
travel
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