Richard Adams: The Unbroken Web

Most people become familiar with Richard Adams through his novel, Watership Down, but not me.  I picked up what looked to be a wonderful nature book at a thrift store called A Nature Diary by Richard Adams. While reading, you felt you were actually with him on Isle of Man in England walking the trails, seeing the birds, identifying plants, and experiencing the weather for that year. It didn't matter that the birds and plants discussed were not the ones I was familiar with on this side of the ocean.  (Although, a trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains was discussed briefly.) The drawings in this book really added to the diary.  Then the library provided me with Nature Through the Seasons, and Nature Day and Night and to taste his story telling ability, I read The Unbroken Web,  a collection of folk-tales he has modernized.  In the introduction, he shares how he feels folk-tales have similar stories in all the world and this gives the title to the book.

"I see in a fancy -- I have a vision of -- the world as the astronauts saw it -- a shining globe, poised in space and rotating on its polar axis.  Round it, enveloping it entirely, as one Chinese carved ivory ball encloses another within it, is a second incorporeal gossamer-like sphere -- the unbroken web -- rotating freely and independently of the rotation of the earth. It is something like a soap-bubble, for although it is in rotation, real things are reflected on its surface, which imparts to the glowing lambent colors. Within this outer web we live. It soaks up, transmute and is charged with human experience, exuded from the world within like steam or an aroma from cooking food. The story-teller is he who reaches up, grasps that part of the web which happens to be above his head at the moment and draws it down -- it is, of course, elastic and unbreakable -- to touch the earth. When he has told his story --its story -- he releases it and it springs back and continues in rotation. The web moves continually above us, so that in time every point on its interior surface passes directly above every point on the surface of the world.  This is why the same stories are found all over the world, among different people who can have had little or no communication with each other."