This summer I have been obsessed with you. One day, I picked up Modern Nature from the bookshelf at home, not expecting to finish it. For weeks it was one of my page-turners, books that I looked forward, during the drudges of the day, to reading in bed at night.

When I finished it, I lamented that you hadn’t been able to write more. I believed you were already dead after those last diary entries. So it was all the more pleasurable when I picked up Smiling in Slow Motion, also at home, to learn that you were spared for a few more years. The same outspokenness, passion, anger, tenderness, struggles, humour, yearning, and your way with words.

The resonance I feel with your diaries certainly has something to do with age: the little physical postcards of bodily decay, more awareness of mortality, the change in how others perceive me, the start of the journey on becoming an old man. But my obsession developed from your gardens, your plants, your herbalist tales, and your relentless record-keeping of what you saw. The reading of the plant names you enumerated awakened my own passion for plants. You opened my eyes to a new way of seeing nature, gardens, and man’s relationship with nature. That could certainly be one way of interpreting Modern Nature.

All these names of plants that you cultivated or saw or recalled brought a new world in my mind. My spine shivered in the same way it did as Ursula Le Guin explained the true name in The Earthsea. You convinced me that you saw plants, nature and gardening as what and how they really were. I don’t have such powers, but I want to capture as much of it as possible, so I spent a couple of weekends flipping through both diaries again and tallied up all the plants you mentioned. Though they were only use-names, commanding them still gave pleasure. I hope to learn their true names in time.

But I did not have enough of you. So I subscribed to BFI streaming and watched everything it had from you: Sebastiane, Jubilee, The Angelic Conversation, Caravaggio, The Garden, Wittgenstein. When we say so and so has a “vision”, you are someone who has it literally. Everything you said in the diaries about filmmaking made sense. The film medium is first and foremost a visual one. As everything is intermediated through our minds, a film’s power lies not in recording reality more completely but in representing what the mind processes from its eyes see. So, though shot in studios and often against a black void, your Caravaggio is splendid, fleshy, sumptuous and decadent, and your Wittgenstein intimate, grand and complete. It did not need blood and gore on the battlefield, because my mind knew he was there. You did not need special effect to manipulate senses and evoke emotions. You showed me how you saw it and how I probably would have seen it.

This is not unlike the sketches included in the diaries. No more than a few outlines, yet a world was conjured up. I’m sure you were able to see so much more of these worlds, this was your power. And you were able to recreate some of it in your art. Thank you.