Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

‘Language is fossil poetry,’ wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844, ‘[a]s the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased

Blinter is a northern Scots word meaning ‘a cold dazzle’, connoting especially ‘the radiance of winter stars on a clear night’,

‘People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love,’ writes the American essayist and farmer Wendell Berry, ‘and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.’

Or as Tim Dee neatly puts it, ‘Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our hearts.’

In 1917 the sociologist and philosopher Max Weber named ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung) as the distinctive injury of modernity. He defined disenchantment as ‘the knowledge or belief that … there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’. For Weber, disenchantment was a function of the rise of rationalism, which demanded the extirpation of dissenting knowledge-kinds in favour of a single master-principle.

Gunn instantly identifies the book’s distinctive manners: precision as a form of lyricism, attention as devotion, exactitude as tribute, description structured by proposition, and facts freed of their ballast such that they levitate and otherwise behave curiously.

Sunset was close as we climbed back up to the plateau, so we waited for it on a westerly slope. As the sun lowered and reddened, cloud wisps blew up from the valley and refracted its light to form a dazzling parhelion: concentric halos of orange, green and pink that circled the sun. Once the sun had gone a pale mist sprang up from the plateau, and we waded knee-deep in its milk back to camp, from where we watched a yellow moon rise above the Braeriach tors. After dark had fallen I walked to the edge of the plateau, where the young Dee crashed down 1,000 feet into the great inward fissure of the Garbh Coire.

We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us. It sticks to us like frost. We cannot tear it away.

all omissions are losses:

it aspires to a completion of memory that is impossible.

those writers and artists for whom northerliness is a mode of perception as well as a geographical position: Matsuo Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North (1689); Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (1995), with its armoured bears and cold that bites to the bones; Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf (1963); Ezra Pound’s translations of classical Chinese frontier poems; the boreal phases of Eric Ravilious’s art; the maps and type-works of Alec Finlay; the fiction of the Hebridean sailor and storyteller Ian Stephen; Margaret Atwood’s explorations of ‘the malevolent north’; W. H. Auden’s poems of jetties, night-sailings and the simmer-dim … Most powerfully, though, and for years now, I have been drawn to the northern prose of Barry Lopez, which I first met in 1997, the year I turned twenty-one.

I came later to realize, a form of moral gaze, born of his belief that if we attend more closely to something then we are less likely to act selfishly towards it. To exercise a care of attention towards a place – as towards a person – is to achieve a sympathetic intimacy with it.

that detail anchors perception in a context of vastness.

Nabokov, in his novel Transparent Things, reflects on the temporal vertigo that can come from the contemplation of the earth’s substance. ‘When we concentrate on a material object,’ he wrote, ‘whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object,’ such that we become ‘not of the now’.

‘Children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them,’ wrote Henry James, memorably, in his Preface to What Maisie Knew (1897). But it might be truer to say that ‘Children have many more terms than we have perceptions to translate them.’

For the speech of young children is subtle in its intricacies and rich in its metaphors. It is not an impoverished dialect of adult speech. Rather, it is another language altogether; impossible for adults to speak and arduous for us to understand. We might call that language ‘Childish’: we have all been fluent in Childish once, and it is a language with a billion or more native speakers today – though all of those speakers will in time forget they ever knew it.

language is at last an untrustworthy medium, mirageous and fissile, never better than approximate in its relation to the world.

language as ‘a city to the building of which every person has brought a stone’.