The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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The concept that “the earliest stories are told not in print but footprint” is brought home by a walk on a beach where erosion of each tide uncovers prehistoric footprints preserved in the mud. He walks in the path of a hunter and spies prints left by playing children. He makes a wonderful digression on the anatomy of feet: I previously read Macfarlane’s Underland, and though I liked it, I found it more lyrical than science-based, and sometimes he got so deeply, personally involved in his subject that I was rolling my eyes in disbelief. He is a man deeply imbued with the spirit of high Romanticism. This book was better, more thoughtful and without so many flights of prose fantasy, and I was sometimes impressed by his ability to come up with evocative little gems, such as “Planes flew past every few minutes, dragging cones of noise,” (p. 55) or “Lift is created by the onwards rush of life over the curved wing of the soul.” (p. 303) On the other hand, sometimes he gets carried away by his words, writing phrases that would embarrass a Hallmark greeting card writer, as with “the sun loosed its summer light, as it had done for uncountable years, across the sea, the island and my body, a liquid so rich that I wanted to eat it, store it, make honey of it for when winter came.” (p. 112) Umm, sure…. Banff Mountain Book Competition Awards" (PDF). Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity . Retrieved 20 January 2022. The book is a nice mix of personal reflection, narration, and history. Included are extended anecdotes about other great "walkers," including the painter Eric Ravilious and the poet Edward Thomas, both victims of wars.

This is truly a wonderful book about walking and our relationship with our landscape. I highly recommend the audiobook read by the sublime Robin Sachs in his wonderful voice. But even despite my poor reading plan the power of his passion was enough to carry me through, as he tells us over and over to take one more look, just one, at what we have around us, and does it with such a lovely passion that it is usually not a strain to listen one more time: Bindlestiff: a tramp or a hobo, especially one carrying a bundle containing a bedroll and other gear. Soren Kierkegaard spoke of every day being able to walk himself "into a state of well-being, away from every illness & into his best thoughts." Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot is a book that endorses the therapeutic value of walking but in particular, following the old & sometimes ancient pathways within the U.K., especially the Hebrides and to points well beyond, including Spain, Palestine & Tibet.

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What I like about this is that it helps me to see the land and the biosphere, feel the land and its life in my body, to relate myself to the land, even in memory, and in the future. As Naomi Klein puts it in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, love will save this place. And for many of Robert's fellow British, who have been (what Klein, again, calls) rootless consumers for most of our lives, feeling connected to the land (other than in a proprietorial or nationalistic way I guess) might be something we can't even remember, something we have to learn like a new language... Dalrymple, William (8 May 2019). "Underland by Robert Macfarlane review – a dazzling journey into deep time". The Guardian. His work has been involved with the music of contemporary musicians including Johnny Flynn, [31] Frank Turner, The Memory Band, Grasscut, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart. He co-wrote the song Coins for Eyes with Flynn for the 9th series of the BBC programme Digging for Britain. [32] Awards and honours [ edit ] Prišla sam svom prvom čitanju Makfarlana s velikim optimizmom i nadom da će mi se svideti. Takoreći nije imalo šta da mi se ne svidi - knjiga o pešačenju i o pešačkim stazama kroz istoriju, delom putopis, delom meditacija, delom istorija filozofije pešačenja i još na sve to s fotografijama. Dodajmo da sam za autora čula preko njegovog istinski prelepog projekta Lost Words, ilustrovane knjige posvećene rečima izbačenim iz Oksfordskog rečnika za decu jer se "premalo koriste": žir, maslačak, vodomar, vrba... I was quite taken by Macfarlane's suggestion that he found the late author Barry Lopez to be a transformative influence; in fact, the exceedingly introspective language he uses is quite reminiscent of Arctic Dreams& other works by Lopez. The work of Edward Thomas seems an even more profound influence. I have been affected by the life & work of Edward Thomas: essayist, soldier, singer, among the most significant of modern English poets--and the guiding spirit of this book. Born in 1878 of Welsh parents and from a young age, both a writer & a walker, Thomas made his reputation with a series of travelogues, natural histories & biographies, as well as poetry, prior to being killed at the age of 39, at dawn on Easter Monday 1917 during the WWI Battle of Arras.It seems that almost every word is accompanied by its etymology, with linguistic declensions abounding in The Old Ways. In charting a path, McFarland comments that... knowledge became codified over time in the form of rudimentary charts & peripli& then in route books in which we see paths that are recorded as narrative poems: the catalogue of ships in the Iliad is a pilot's mnemonic, for instance as is the Massaliote Periplus (possibly 6th century BC).

But something seemed disturbingly unconscious about it, how nothing about it made me feel the threat of climate change, how the text is almost studiously apolitical, even in Palestine. Her brow furrowed. "The Israelis have stolen this land from us, they are thieves. I once wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan, I knew it would go in the waste-paper basket, but I needed to get it off my chest. 'Dear President Reagan,' it began... David is a former scholar of Renaissance literature, turned antiquarian-book dealer, turned barrister, turned tax lawyer. He is probably the only Marxist tax lawyer in London, possibly in the world. He likes wearing britches, likes walking barefoot, and hopes daily for the downfall of capitalism. He is 6'7" tall, very thin, very clever, and has little interest in people who take it upon themselves to comment without invitation on his height and spindliness. We have covered a lot of miles together. (66) His explorations have led him to include other walkers in his book such as George Borrow who “spent more than 40 years exploring England, Wales and Europe on foot.” He goes on to explain that “like many long-distance walkers he was a depressive […] walking became a means of out striding his sadness.” I too have found walking therapeutic to my soul.Beyond that, for Robert Macfarlane, a University of Cambridge professor & the author of numerous other books, including Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places,"the metaphors we use deliver us hope, or they foreclose possibility." The finest essay writing about ways -- paths both terra firma, water, sand, snow, and ice. Each chapter is a separate work, and Macfarlane interweaves his story of experiencing the path and introduces the reader to past travelers and present masters of the path. Moments of the most brilliant prose (naturalist perspective) I have ever read. Sentences I would read again and again for their freshness and astounding organization. "The moon, low, a waxing half, richly coloured -- a red-butter moon, setting down its own path on the water. The sea full of luminescent plankton, so behind us purled our wake, a phosphorescent line of green and yellow bees, as if the hull were setting a hive swarm beneath us. We were at the convergence of many paths of light, which flexed and moved with us as we are headed north" (134). A marvellous marriage of scholarship, imagination and evocation of place. I always feel exhilarated after reading Macfarlane' Penelope Lively In this intricate, sensuous, haunted book, each journey is part of other journeys and there are no clear divisions to be made the walking of paths is, to [Macfarlane], an education, and symbolic, too, of the very process by which we learn things: testing, wandering about a bit, hitting our stride, looking ahead and behind. Alexandra Harris, "The Guardian""