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A review by jwsg
The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane
4.0
I felt like reading something completely different. And so I picked up Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places. And it was different, on multiple levels. First, I’m not a Nature person. I like the idea of Nature but shy away from the realities of humidity, damp, cold, creepy crawlies and what have you. MacFarlane is a Nature person who needs to seek out the wild, the remote. And so he journeys to Ynys Enlli off the tip of the Lleyn Peninsula of North Wales, to the valley of Coruisk on the Isle of Skye, Rannoch Moor, the Black Wood adjacent to Rannoch Moor, Strathnaver (the valley of the River Strath), Cape Wrath, Ben Hope, the Burren in County Clare, the Cumbrian mountains, the holloway network of Dorset, the shingle desert of Orford Ness, the saltmarshes of Essex and Hope Valley in the Peak District. He sleeps out on the moor (where in the middle of the night a herd of deer slosh across a river a few yards from him), at the foot of a fallen tree in the snow, out in sand dunes in the rain and storm, at the summit of Ben Hope in the winter cold, on a frozen tarn in the Cumbrian mountains, among many other places. These aspirations, these desires are completely alien to me. MacFarlane recounts that it was “far too cold to sleep” on the summit of Ben Hope. I wonder why he would put himself through this experience.
Second, the rhythm and the style of MacFarlane’s writing were completely different from my usual (non-nature) reading fare. This is writing to linger over and savour, to be read in a quiet cosy spot with a mug of something hot to drink. It is not writing to be devoured and, I would argue, read on the packed morning commute. It is beautiful writing. Like when MacFarlane describes waking up in the middle of the night on a ridge in the Cumbrian mountains:
“I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountains across the valley were iron. The deeper moonshadows had a tinge of steel blue to them. Otherwise, there was no true colour. Everything was greys, black, sharp silver-white. Inclined sheets of ice gleamed like tin. The hailstones lay about like shot, millions of them, grouped up against each rock and clustered in snow hollows. The air smelt of minerals and frost.”
And some of the moments MacFarlane describes are breathtaking and magical. Like when he takes a swim at 2am (madness – how cold the water must have been!) near Enlli and encounters phosphorescence:
“Where it was undisturbed, the water was still and black. But where it was stirred, it burned with light. Every movement I made provoked a brilliant swirl, and everywhere it lapped against a floating body it was struck into colour, so that the few boats moored in the bay were outlined with luminescence, gleaming off their wet sloped sides. Glancing back, the cove, the cliffs and the caves all appeared trimmed with light. I found that I could fling long streaks of fire from my fingertips, sorcerer-style, so I stood in the shallows for a few happy minutes, pretending to be Merlin, dispensing magic right and left.”
Reading MacFarlane makes you realize what we lose when we distance ourselves from the wild, from nature. Like how we read and perceive the landscape. Most of us are only familiar with the road atlas (or Google Maps these days). MacFarlane notes:
“The commonest map of Britain is the road atlas. Pick one up, and you see the meshwork of motorways and roads which covers the surface of the country…Considering the road atlas, an absence also becomes visible. The wild places are no longer marked. The fells, the caves, the tors, the woods, the moors, the river valleys and the marshes have all but disappeared…The land itself, of course, has no desires as to how it should be represented. It is indifferent to its pictures and to its picturers. But maps organize information about a landscape in a profoundly influential way. They carry out a triage of its aspects, selecting and ranking those aspects in an order of importance, and so they create forceful biases in the ways a landscape is perceived and treated…The priorities of the modern road atlas are clear. Drawn by computers from satellite photos, it is a map that speaks of transit and displacement. It encourages us to imagine the land itself only as a context for motorized travel. It warps its readers away from the natural world…The road atlas makes it easy to forget the physical presence of terrain, that the countries we call England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales comprise more than 5,000 islands, 500 mountains and 300 rivers. It refuses the idea that long before they were political, cultural and economic entities, these lands were places of stone, wood and water.”
We forget that there are rhythms other than those of the 24-hour clock and the Gregorian calendar. But venture away from civilization into the wild places and you’ll be reminded that time expresses itself in terms not only of hours and minutes, but also in the quickness of “the sudden drop of a raven in flight, the veer of water round a rock, the darts of damselflies, the midges who were born, danced and died in a single day”. And that time also expresses itself in long slow arcs, like “the ice’s relentless progress seawards down the slope of time”.
Finally, when we are estranged from nature, we forget that “we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity”:
“Stargazing gives us access to orders of events, and scales of time and space, which are beyond our capacity to imagine: it is unsurprising that dreams of humility and reverence have been directed towards the moon and the stars for as long as human culture has recorded itself. Our disenchantment of the night through artificial lighting may appear, if it is noticed at all, as a regrettable but eventually trivial side effect of contemporary life…it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.”
Reading MacFarlane reminded me that there’s a whole body of knowledge that I’m completely ignorant of – the knowledge of trees and plants, of rocks and soil, of birds and insects. I’m completely attuned to the landscapes and rhythms of the city. The city is an entity that I consider legible. I can navigate the city. The wild, however, is completely illegible to me. MacFarlane looks at the land and thinks schist, limestone, gritstone, serpentine, gabbro, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Jurassic. I think rock. He looks at a forest and sees rowans, juniper, alders, cherry, poplar, beech, birch and crack willow. I see trees. MacFarlane looks at flocks of birds and immediately starts identifying them – shearwaters, pipits, egrets, terns, dunlins, redshanks, curlews, oystercatchers. I see creatures that might poop on me when they fly overhead.
I don’t think I’ll be a Nature person who relishes getting out into the wild, seeing the cold and rain as a bonus. But The Wild Places did remind me what we lose when we distance ourselves from nature.
A challenging read but well worth it.
Second, the rhythm and the style of MacFarlane’s writing were completely different from my usual (non-nature) reading fare. This is writing to linger over and savour, to be read in a quiet cosy spot with a mug of something hot to drink. It is not writing to be devoured and, I would argue, read on the packed morning commute. It is beautiful writing. Like when MacFarlane describes waking up in the middle of the night on a ridge in the Cumbrian mountains:
“I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountains across the valley were iron. The deeper moonshadows had a tinge of steel blue to them. Otherwise, there was no true colour. Everything was greys, black, sharp silver-white. Inclined sheets of ice gleamed like tin. The hailstones lay about like shot, millions of them, grouped up against each rock and clustered in snow hollows. The air smelt of minerals and frost.”
And some of the moments MacFarlane describes are breathtaking and magical. Like when he takes a swim at 2am (madness – how cold the water must have been!) near Enlli and encounters phosphorescence:
“Where it was undisturbed, the water was still and black. But where it was stirred, it burned with light. Every movement I made provoked a brilliant swirl, and everywhere it lapped against a floating body it was struck into colour, so that the few boats moored in the bay were outlined with luminescence, gleaming off their wet sloped sides. Glancing back, the cove, the cliffs and the caves all appeared trimmed with light. I found that I could fling long streaks of fire from my fingertips, sorcerer-style, so I stood in the shallows for a few happy minutes, pretending to be Merlin, dispensing magic right and left.”
Reading MacFarlane makes you realize what we lose when we distance ourselves from the wild, from nature. Like how we read and perceive the landscape. Most of us are only familiar with the road atlas (or Google Maps these days). MacFarlane notes:
“The commonest map of Britain is the road atlas. Pick one up, and you see the meshwork of motorways and roads which covers the surface of the country…Considering the road atlas, an absence also becomes visible. The wild places are no longer marked. The fells, the caves, the tors, the woods, the moors, the river valleys and the marshes have all but disappeared…The land itself, of course, has no desires as to how it should be represented. It is indifferent to its pictures and to its picturers. But maps organize information about a landscape in a profoundly influential way. They carry out a triage of its aspects, selecting and ranking those aspects in an order of importance, and so they create forceful biases in the ways a landscape is perceived and treated…The priorities of the modern road atlas are clear. Drawn by computers from satellite photos, it is a map that speaks of transit and displacement. It encourages us to imagine the land itself only as a context for motorized travel. It warps its readers away from the natural world…The road atlas makes it easy to forget the physical presence of terrain, that the countries we call England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales comprise more than 5,000 islands, 500 mountains and 300 rivers. It refuses the idea that long before they were political, cultural and economic entities, these lands were places of stone, wood and water.”
We forget that there are rhythms other than those of the 24-hour clock and the Gregorian calendar. But venture away from civilization into the wild places and you’ll be reminded that time expresses itself in terms not only of hours and minutes, but also in the quickness of “the sudden drop of a raven in flight, the veer of water round a rock, the darts of damselflies, the midges who were born, danced and died in a single day”. And that time also expresses itself in long slow arcs, like “the ice’s relentless progress seawards down the slope of time”.
Finally, when we are estranged from nature, we forget that “we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity”:
“Stargazing gives us access to orders of events, and scales of time and space, which are beyond our capacity to imagine: it is unsurprising that dreams of humility and reverence have been directed towards the moon and the stars for as long as human culture has recorded itself. Our disenchantment of the night through artificial lighting may appear, if it is noticed at all, as a regrettable but eventually trivial side effect of contemporary life…it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.”
Reading MacFarlane reminded me that there’s a whole body of knowledge that I’m completely ignorant of – the knowledge of trees and plants, of rocks and soil, of birds and insects. I’m completely attuned to the landscapes and rhythms of the city. The city is an entity that I consider legible. I can navigate the city. The wild, however, is completely illegible to me. MacFarlane looks at the land and thinks schist, limestone, gritstone, serpentine, gabbro, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Jurassic. I think rock. He looks at a forest and sees rowans, juniper, alders, cherry, poplar, beech, birch and crack willow. I see trees. MacFarlane looks at flocks of birds and immediately starts identifying them – shearwaters, pipits, egrets, terns, dunlins, redshanks, curlews, oystercatchers. I see creatures that might poop on me when they fly overhead.
I don’t think I’ll be a Nature person who relishes getting out into the wild, seeing the cold and rain as a bonus. But The Wild Places did remind me what we lose when we distance ourselves from nature.
A challenging read but well worth it.