The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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a b "The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape". The Guardian. 27 February 2015 . Retrieved 5 May 2019. We are spared that kind of scene here, I am pleased to report, and I must also add that "godforsaken" is pretty much the last word Macfarlane would use to describe a mountain. In his chapter on walking in the Himalayas, he quotes a companion on the concept of darshan, a Sanskrit word that "suggests a face-to-face encounter with the sacred on earth; with a physical manifestation of the holy", and we are reminded that the Sherpas who accompanied the first expeditions had no word to describe the summit of a mountain, as that was where the gods lived, so it would be blasphemous even to try to reach one. McFarlane finds further roots for his mode of thinking in the romanticism of George Burrow in the mid-19th century and early environmentalism of John Muir toward the end of the century. But as with classic travel books, he takes delight in the inspiration of the colorful, living people he meets on his journeys. His story is enriched as he expands his line of thinking to seaways and riverways. A trip in a small boat in the Outer Hebrides to a remote bird nesting island long targeted for an annual harvest leads to ruminations on how human use of known pathways over the water in prehistoric times made these apparently isolated communities by the sea more connected culturally with comparable seafaring peoples in the Baltic and Mediterranean countries than with communities of inland U.K. at the time--the sea as gateway. A visit to ancient pilgrim paths in Spain and Tibet rounds out the wonderful journeys in this book. Anne Campbell on Lewis is "searching for the atavistic memory of maps of paths reclaimed by peat & time." Steve Dilworth on the Island of Harris recounts that he "has spent a lifetime making ritual objects from gathered local materials for a tribe that doesn't exist." Colorful characters abound in this book, serving as a pleasant relief from some of the more technical aspects that abide in The Old Ways. Mojoj dobroj volji je, nažalost, najveća prepreka bio Makfarlan sam, odnosno njegov trud da čitaocu pokaže šta sve zna i ume. I kaćiperski bogat rečnik (glosar na kraju knjige je istinski neophodan) i usiljeno tražena neočekivana poređenja i metafore, i štrebersko razbacivanje (naročito u prvoj trećini knjige) time šta je sve čitao i koga sve ume da citira na zgodnom mestu. A istovremeno se uspostavlja neka čudna distanciranost između čitaoca i pripovedača, kao da se oseća koliko je toga ličnog izostavljeno ili prilagođeno zahtevima ove knjige da se ne naškodi stvaranju željene slike. Bilo bi to u redu da se istovremeno ne insistira na dokumentarnosti, pripovedanju u prvom licu, intimnosti s čitaocem; sve vreme mi je to kao sitan pesak škripalo među zubima.

Robert Macfarlane erhält Sachbuchpreis von NDR Kultur". Focus. 11 November 2019 . Retrieved 11 December 2019.The Lost Words campaign delivers nature 'spellbook' to Scottish schools". The Guardian. 10 February 2018 . Retrieved 5 May 2019. Sublime... It sets the imagination tingling, laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow' Sunday Times Macfarlane relishes wild, as well as old, places.He writes about both beautifully . . . I love to read Macfarlane' John Sutherland, Financial Times

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). Macfarlane's way of looking and describing is shaped by two men in particular. In one chapter he takes his bearings from the watercolourist Eric Ravilious, "a votary of whiteness and remoteness, and a visionary of the everyday". Taking to his skis somewhere north of Swindon, Macfarlane experiences the Marlborough Downs – via Ravilious – as a variation on the Arctic. Ravilious spent most of his working life not on chalk downland but in Essex; he is, to my mind, just as brilliant when painting cucumber frames in a greenhouse as when he renders the chill of ice. But Macfarlane's version of him brings out qualities I would never have seen. Now, after five years of work, Macfarlane has produced a sort-of sequel. The Old Ways is in some ways a continuation of its predecessors, being also about the connections between man and landscape. While in The Wild Places the chapters are arranged by topography – Beechwood, Island, Valley, Saltmarsh and Tor – in The Old Ways we have geological textures: Chalk, Silt, Peat, Roots and Flint. In other ways, however, Macfarlane inverts the concluding proposition of The Wild Places. For in The Old Ways the roads are shown to be almost indestructible, as if existing in geological rather than in human time, binding man to his past. His father John Macfarlane is a respiratory physician who co-authored the CURB-65 score of pneumonia in 2003. His brother James is also a consultant physician in respiratory medicine. He is married to Julia Lovell, and has three children. [ citation needed] Books [ edit ]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: There are textbooks too. A Victorian field guide, for example, describes Agrimonia in rather uncompromising terms: "Herbs with stipulate, pinnate, serrate leaves and terminal bracteate spine-like racemes of small yellow flowers." Macfarlane is not much the wiser. "I was pressed to think of a description less likely to help me identify agrimony when I saw it." He quotes that little snippet from a past age of botanical expertise as a kind of public self-reproach. A nature writer, after all, should probably know his field flora. But then again, the quotation serves to emphasise the distinctiveness of Macfarlane's nature-writing in The Old Ways. He wants to find a language for sensory experience, and to test the languages used by walkers before him. It's amazing how viewing others enjoying themselves can revitalize our own energy. At one point after covering several miles, McFarlane stops to watch folk running and playing on the heath and writes, “The pleasure these people were taking in their landscape and the feeling of company after the empty early miles of the day gave me a burst of energy and lifted my legs.” Shippey, Tom (5 August 2016). "Why You Can't Say Where You Are - WSJ". Wall Street Journal . Retrieved 5 May 2019. Macfarlane tends to prefer the wilder and woollier environments. His second book, The Wild Places, tried to get as close to wilderness as these islands can provide; I have not read his first, Mountains of the Mind, because of a review that said he describes whittling his frozen fingers with a penknife while crawling up, or down, some godforsaken peak.

Society of Authors' Awards | The Society of Authors". www.societyofauthors.org. 8 May 2020 . Retrieved 20 January 2022. Bindlestiff: a tramp or a hobo, especially one carrying a bundle containing a bedroll and other gear.

Creative Play

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." Macfarlane's 2012 book Holloway was adapted into a short film shot on Super-8 by the film-maker Adam Scovell. Ne bi bilo fer prećutati: Makfarlan stvarno mnogo zna i mnogo toga je video, susretao je istinski zanimljive i neobične ljude, sve je lepo sročeno i kako treba poređano, sigurna sam da će drugi čitaoci naći štošta interesantno i nadahnjujuće. Pa ipak je Makfarlanovo pisanje književni ekvivalent glumi Leonarda Dikaprija: previše se upinje. Macfarlane seems to know and have read everything his every sentence rewrites the landscape in language crunchy and freshly minted and deeply textured. Surely the most accomplished (and erudite) writer on place to have come along in years." Pico Iyer