about nations having their own crowd symbols, images of unity that underpin and encompass an individual’s sense of identity with the societal mass. We sea-fever Brits got the ocean wave. And the Germans got the forest. No jungle chaos for Canetti, he has the trees as stout, sky-scraping winter warriors, the land-spanning Taiga belt of conifers with their bark as protective as chain mail, as uniform as ranks of feldgrau sentinels. It seems unwise to me, trying to stamp a nation with a symbol, but I can see the attraction, for that’s what we do to this world and its wonders with our letterbox-on-the-universe peering minds, generalizing and surmising, deducing and guessing as we journey through our days. We do it from the first scream to our last flutter, making sense of the insensible. But I don’t go into the woods and see order, warriors, a press of like-minds and a tight-knit volk. I don’t feel returned to the tribe. Fair to Canetti, it could be that’s because I’m not German – but I feel lonely on the sea too. I go to the woods for the quiet and the calm, and the feeling they’ve stood undisturbed and mysterious long before my arrival. I go there to feel alone. Leaf-kicking outsiders and mopers, where is our crowd symbol?
