Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

The substitutions made in the dictionary – the outdoor and the natural being displaced by the indoor and the virtual – are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live. Children are now (and valuably) adept ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few for different trees and creatures.

Wary, too, of being seen to advocate a tyranny of the nominal – a taxonomic need to point and name, with the intent of citing and owning – when in fact I perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not-knowing.

There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo – or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, ‘Wow.’

Before you become a writer you must first become a reader. Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write; this continues to be true throughout a writer’s life.

Strong books and strong words can be landmarks in Smith’s sense – offering us a means both of establishing our location and of knowing how we ‘beare by the compasse’.

In modernity, mastery usurped mystery. Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back to us in ways that they might. As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us. We find it hard to imagine nature outside a use-value framework. We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us.

Certain kinds of language can restore a measure of wonder to our relations with nature. Others might offer modest tools for modest place-making. Others still might free objects at least momentarily from their role as standing reserve.

We need now, urgently, a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the world – a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen.

We need to know how nature proceeds, of course, but we need also to keep wonder alive in our descriptions of it: to provide celebrations of not-quite-knowing, of mystification, of excess.

It involves not probing for answers, but watching and waiting. And precision, for Moore, is best enabled by metaphor: another reminder that metaphor is not merely something that adorns thought but is, substantively, thought itself.

Again and again when we are brought short by natural events – the helix of a raptor’s ascent on a thermal; a flock of knots shoaling over an east-coast estuary; the shadows of cumulus clouds moving across Lewisian moorland on a sunny day – the astonishment we feel concerns a gift freely given, a natural potlatch. During such encounters, we briefly return to a pre-economical state in which things can be ‘tendered’, as Adam Potkay puts it, ‘that is, treated with tenderness – because of the generosity of their self-giving, as if alterity were itself pure gift’.

is that the true mark of long acquaintance with a single place is a readiness to accept uncertainty: a contentment with the knowledge that you must not seek complete knowledge.

melancholy differs from grief in its chronic nature: it is an ache not a wound, it lies deeper down, is longer lasting, is lived with rather than died of. We might perhaps imagine melancholy hydrologically, as a kind of groundwater – seeping darkly onwards, occasionally surfacing as depression or anguish.

magnitude of scale is no metric by which to judge natural spectacle, and that wonder is now, more than ever, an essential survival skill.

In the architecture of dens, function is subservient to form:

And our children’s vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of imagination as well as a loss of primary experience.

if children abandon ‘the sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands’, if ‘children are not permitted … to be adventurers and explorers as children’, then ‘what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?’