Quotes About Fens

And if any landscape can provide darkness, with a very real hint of menace, it is most surely the Fens.

Why are the Fens flat? So God has a clear view...

For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing?

Crossing the Fens by boat there comes the realisation that water not earth or sky is the natural element in this landscape.

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?

As darkness was falling at the edge of the Fens, rain started to fall too.