BREAKING #307

‘We are in what passes away’

Nicole Ex

Column

March 2026

Nicole Ex

is a writer, art historian, and founder of See All This art magazine. Since 2020, she writes a weekly column for the BREAKING-the-week art newsletter.

Column

March 2026

I fell through a tear in time. I was on the bus home, closed my eyes, and simply drifted off to sleep. Where had that deep, unquestioning trust suddenly come from? It was the book of poems on my lap, Odes by Sharon Olds, whose words carried me through a car wash: I emerged clean and gleaming in the afternoon sun.

I dozed with my head against the window. But I was not there: I was lying against a shoulder in a hotel room in Rome, in that same afternoon light of this first day of spring, the windows open to the noise of the city, the dome of the Pantheon close by. Years ago. Odes, Sharon Olds: there can never be enough of them, offered up and written.

The film Whispers in the Woods / Le Chant des Forêts, too, is a magnificent ode by the French filmmaker Vincent Munier, who films the forests of the Vosges and offers a hymn to his father and his son – and to the things this family loves with such abandon: the capercaillie, the crane, the forest, the mist and the snow.

The cinematography is monochrome like Dürer’s etchings, hazed like Turner’s paintings, abstract like the colour fields of Rothko and Richter. The three sisters sit together in row five of the cinema, slipping back through time, to a father who helped us to focus a pair of binoculars and how to listen for the song thrush and the robin.

My father knew so much more than I ever imagined. I should have taken his outstretched hand, should have remained beside him in the woods and on the heath. The film shows why. But it is nature that yields the deepest lessons. Michel Munier’s father puts it simply: ‘We are in what passes away.’

This morning, I was woken by a blackbird. I saw her outline in the low-lying mist.