Robert MacFarlane is precise in presenting his sprawling hunger for the wild. He sleeps out on a beach in a raging storm, on a bare mountaintop in the cold, and in all manner of haunted woods and rocks. His prose is refined, carefully deployed as if he were doing microsurgery. His wanderlust is...
A beautiful, affecting and haunting book, with probably the finest descriptive prose I've ever read. It's non-fiction so there's little more to say beyond the wealth of emotion it evokes in this boy who grew up in the country. Few books will stay with me quite the way this one has, if anyone pers...
In projected volumes Macfarlane proposes to take up valleys, deserts and oceans of the mind. These sound plausible as any "collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans--a mountain of the mind" (18, 19). The value of collaboration is this, we can have mountains, ...
In winter, storm winds of up to 170 miles per hour rasp the upper shires of the range, and avalanches scour its slopes. Even in high summer, snow still lies in the deepest corries, sintering slowly into ice. The Northern Lights flare green and red above its summits. The wind is so strong that on ...
THOMAS BURNET, 1684 It was a winter afternoon and I had walked up into a high valley in the Canadian Rockies, following a river whose banks were formed of round boulders. The water of the lake at the head of the valley, on whose shoreline I stood, was frozen – the red reed beds at its periphery l...
What quests they propose! They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the underworld of the past. Edward Thomas (1909) Footprints in the wet white earth of the path. The ridge of the South Downs I was walking had become a frontier in the landscape, dividing the...