Into the wild
May 4, 2013 0:32:36 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on May 4, 2013 0:32:36 GMT -5
Good morning to you all! My eldest sister recently gave me a book to read called 'The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot', which I commend to everyone reading 'The Third'. Writing in the FT, John Sutherland observes that Robert Macfarlane is a walker of heroic ambulations. Told in Macfarlane's distinctive and celebrated voice, the book folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology and literature. His tracks take him from the chalk downs of England to the bird-islands of the Scottish northwest, and from the disputed territories of Palestine to the sacred landscapes of Spain and the Himalayas. Along the way he walks stride for stride with a 5000-year-old man near Liverpool, follows the 'deadliest path in Britain', sails an open boat out into the Atlantic at night, and crosses paths with walkers of many kinds - wanderers, wayfarers, pilgrims, guides, shamans, poets, trespassers and devouts. He discovers that paths offer not just means of traversing space, but also of feeling, knowing and thinking. The old ways lead us unexpectedly to the new, and the voyage out is always a voyage inwards.
Amazon - The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
FT - Into the wild: wonder mingles with melancholy in five fine meditations on nature that shine with a quality that one can only call spiritual
Most people will move to megacities over the course of the twenty-first century. In 2008, for the first time in history, half the world's population was living in an urban rather rural environment. For all those who can still enjoy the countryside during the third millennium, however, let us walk into the wild! I propose some toast: to Sydney Grew, 'The Third Programme' and all of you! Three cheers from kleines c and the gang (Nyetimber Classic Cuvée 2004)!
Nyetimber
Amazon - The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
' “This book could not have been written by sitting still” he declares in his vigorous preface to The Old Ways (the reader shifts guiltily). The Macfarlane feet are from heel to toe, he informs us, “a measured space of 29.7cm or 11.7in. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought.” He concurs with Nietzsche (Macfarlane is a very bookish walker): “Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value” (cue more guilty shifting by the sedentary reader).
Humans, avers Macfarlane, “are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk”. The tracks of humans are, unlike those of other animals, designated “paths”. Paths are images of community: “Consensual, because without common care and common practice they disappear.” Paths need walking. Communities need paths. He recalls that in 19th-century Suffolk: “Small sickles called ‘hooks’ were hung on stiles and posts at the start of certain well-used paths: those running between villages, for instance, or byways to parish churches. A walker would pick up a hook and use it to lop off tendrils or branches that were starting to impede passage. The hook would then be left at the other end of the path, for a walker coming in the other direction.”
Even in British city centres, roads overlay what were once paths. Sickles might be useful, one sometimes feels, negotiating the Hanger Lane gyratory system. But one can console oneself that such gridlock frustrations go back centuries to when it was, indeed, a lane. (America’s urban grids make me, and I suspect other visitors to the country, profoundly nervous, as if somehow caged.) The first section of 'The Old Ways' records a walk along the Icknield Way, the oldest of them all, running from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk. It was beaten by human foot long before London magnetically drew all roads to itself. It has the internal logic of a ley line, not a thoroughfare. Later sections of the book record sea, coast and island excursions in the Hebrides. Macfarlane relishes wild, as well as old, places. He writes about both beautifully ... '
Humans, avers Macfarlane, “are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk”. The tracks of humans are, unlike those of other animals, designated “paths”. Paths are images of community: “Consensual, because without common care and common practice they disappear.” Paths need walking. Communities need paths. He recalls that in 19th-century Suffolk: “Small sickles called ‘hooks’ were hung on stiles and posts at the start of certain well-used paths: those running between villages, for instance, or byways to parish churches. A walker would pick up a hook and use it to lop off tendrils or branches that were starting to impede passage. The hook would then be left at the other end of the path, for a walker coming in the other direction.”
Even in British city centres, roads overlay what were once paths. Sickles might be useful, one sometimes feels, negotiating the Hanger Lane gyratory system. But one can console oneself that such gridlock frustrations go back centuries to when it was, indeed, a lane. (America’s urban grids make me, and I suspect other visitors to the country, profoundly nervous, as if somehow caged.) The first section of 'The Old Ways' records a walk along the Icknield Way, the oldest of them all, running from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk. It was beaten by human foot long before London magnetically drew all roads to itself. It has the internal logic of a ley line, not a thoroughfare. Later sections of the book record sea, coast and island excursions in the Hebrides. Macfarlane relishes wild, as well as old, places. He writes about both beautifully ... '
FT - Into the wild: wonder mingles with melancholy in five fine meditations on nature that shine with a quality that one can only call spiritual
Most people will move to megacities over the course of the twenty-first century. In 2008, for the first time in history, half the world's population was living in an urban rather rural environment. For all those who can still enjoy the countryside during the third millennium, however, let us walk into the wild! I propose some toast: to Sydney Grew, 'The Third Programme' and all of you! Three cheers from kleines c and the gang (Nyetimber Classic Cuvée 2004)!
Nyetimber