I was asked why I don’t write things down

“One interrogator accused me of bad faith: that if I sincerely felt so deeply on the matter, I should write more about it. But what I gain most from nature is beyond words. To try to capture it verbally immediately places me in the same boat as the namers and would-be owners of nature: that is, it exiles me from what I most need to learn. It is a little as it is in atomic physics, where the very act of observation changes what is observed; though here the catch lies in trying to describe the observation. To enter upon such a description is like trying to capture the uncapturable. Its only purpose can be to flatter the vanity of the describer – a function painfully obvious in many of the more sentimental natural history writers.”
– John Fowles, The Tree