Max

“Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“One of the reasons I enjoy being with Finlay is his ability to read landscapes back into being, and to hold multiple eras of history in plain sight simultaneously. To each feature and place name he can attach a story - geological, folkloric, historical, gossipy. He moves easily between different knowledge systems and historical eras, in awareness of their discrepancies but stimulated by their overlaps and rhymes. Scatters of stones are summoned up and reconstituted in his descriptions into living crofts. He took me to a green knoll in Baile n Cille in mid-Lewis, and recalled for me the scene in 1827 when a Reverend Dr MacDonald had gathered 7,000 people around the knoll for a mass conversion to Calvinism. A crag-and-tail outcrop of gneiss in the moor drew him back into the Holocene and an explanation of how, after the glaciers had retreated from the Western Isles around 12,000 years ago, the peat began to deepen in the lees of the exposed rock-backs. To Finlay, geography and history are consubstantial. Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

“Each of us possesses five fundamental, enthralling maps to the natural world: sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell. As we unravel the threads that bind us to nature, as denizens of data and artifice, amid crowds and clutter, we become miserly with these loyal and exquisite guides, we numb our sensory intelligence. This failure of attention will make orphans of us all.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky

“Sometimes the desert exhilarates me to the point of soaring. Other times I am so heartsick I cannot bear up against the despair, a palpable, aching longing. Longing for this wild beauty to last and for me never to die and no longer be able to feel, see, hear, taste, and breathe it. A yearning to die before the desert's wild heart is lost so I do not have to witness it. A longing to be a better person, for the world to be a better place, for us to truly measure up to this land, for this land not to be a battlefield of anger and greed. When these two opposing conditions, elation and despair, follow one another too quickly, the universe seems careless and precipitate. I soar, I crash, a squall of heat let loose in the ethos.

Or else I get hungry.”
― Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky