Landmarks (30 page)

Read Landmarks Online

Authors: Robert Macfarlane

BOOK: Landmarks
12.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

‘a vast, dead place … swept by a chill wet wind’
: Ian Jack, ‘Breathing Space’,
Guardian
, 26 July 2006.

‘abominable … a waste and a howling wilderness’
: Daniel Defoe,
A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies
, 3 vols. (London: Strahan, 1724–6), vol. III, p. 74.

‘hideous blank … dreary, dismal desert’
: Argus,
June 1858. See, for a discussion of the perception of the Australian interior as
terra nullius,
the third chapter of Roslynn Doris Haynes,
Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

‘so much [of it] is unproductive wilderness’
: James Carnegy-Arbuthnott, quoted in the
Guardian
, 10 August 2013,
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/10/scotland-land-rights
. Compare the July 2013 comments of the Conservative peer Lord Howell during ‘Lords’ Questions’ that the north-east of England contains ‘large and uninhabited and desolate areas’ where ‘there’s plenty of room for fracking’, ‘without any kind of threat to the rural environment’,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthvideo/10211388/Lord-Howell-frack-the-desolate-North-East.html.

‘it is precisely what is invisible … a place to another’
: this is Barry Lopez’s gloss on Yi Fu Tuan’s arguments in his
Topophilia
(1974). See
AD
, p. 278.

‘Those who wish to explain to politicians … sounding either wet or extreme’
: MacLeod, ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’.

‘An Talamh Briste, Na Feadanan Gorma
… or to commemorate stories’
: Anne Campbell and Jon MacLeod,
A-mach an Gleann
(Stornoway: privately published, 2007),
passim
.

‘Scotland small? Our multiform … marvellously descriptive! And incomplete!’
: Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Scotland Small?’, in ‘Dìreadh I’, from
Complete Poems
, Vol. II (Manchester: Carcanet, 1994), p. 1,170.

‘What is required … a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’
: MacLeod, ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’.

‘something emotive abides in the land … invisible to the ironist’
: Lopez and Gwartney,
Home Ground
, p. xviii.

‘a narrative not fully known … larger chains of events’
: Adam Potkay, ‘Wordsworth and the Ethics of Things’,
PMLA
123:2 (2008), 394. This deep-buried meaning of the word
thing
is likely to be a residue of the Old Danish
Thing
as designating a community meeting where legal issues were disputed and settled; i.e. a parliament or a court. In such a context, the idea of a
Thing
bears within it a judicial space of uncertainty, the connotation of a matter whose resolution has yet to be determined.

‘galvanized against inertia … as our natural reticence allows us to be’
: Marianne Moore, ‘Feeling and Precision’,
Sewanee Review
52:4 (October–December 1944), 499–500. I am compelled, too, by Moore’s fanaticism for rhythm as a means of cognition, a kind of precision: ‘it [the effect] begins far back of the beat, so that you don’t see when the down beat comes. It was started such a long distance ahead, it makes it possible to be exact.’

‘For knowledge, add; for wisdom, take away’
: Charles Simic, quoted by Jan Zwicky in
Wisdom & Metaphor
(Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2005), p. 74.

In this respect it would inhabit … reciprocal perception between human and non-human
: see John Llewellyn,
The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience
(New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991).

‘John Locke, in the seventeenth century … he had perceived or imagined it’
: Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Funes the Memorious’, in
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
(New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 65.

‘tendered … alterity were itself pure gift’
: Potkay, ‘Ethics of Things’, 401. Potkay draws on the work of Sylvia Benso; see also Larkin, ‘Scarcely on the Way’.

‘having language to hand’
: Zwicky,
Wisdom & Metaphor
, p. 32.

‘Tact: 1 (a) …
translating Andreas Ornithoparcus)

:
OED
online.

Tact as due attention … as rightful tactility
: see Valentine Cunningham,
Reading After Theory
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001).

Chapter 3: The Living Mountain

‘the elementals’
:
LM
, p. 4.

‘heaven-appointed task … to the approved pattern’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

‘I have had the same bedroom all my life!’
: Nan Shepherd, quoted in Vivienne Forrest, ‘In Search of Nan Shepherd’,
Leopard Magazine
(December 1986–January 1987), 17.

‘all movement … those limbs move as you look at them’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Barbara Balmer, 15 January 1981, private collection.

‘library-cormorant’
: Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Collected Letters 1785–1800
, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 156.

‘a tall slim figure with a halo … an awe-inspiring dispatch case’
: anon., quoted in Louise Donald, ‘Nan Shepherd’,
Leopard Magazine
(October 1977), 21.


long lean man … need not cease to exhilarate’
: Nan Shepherd, quoted in ibid., 20.

‘dark wisdom, almost sorcery … giant ruffled eagle’s feather’
: Erlend Clouston, personal communication, 30 April 2014.

‘Poetry … burning heart of life’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 14 March 1930, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

‘possess[ed] … kind of thing that comes out of me’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931.

‘snow driving dim on the blast … green as ice’
:
ITC
, pp. 3, 53.

‘does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself’
:
LM
, p. 23.

‘not out of myself, but in myself’
: ibid., p. 108.

‘Oh burnie with the glass-white … over stone …’
:
ITC
, p. 1.

‘I’ve gone dumb … for the mere sake of making a noise’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931.

‘Dear Nan, You don’t need me to tell you … hill & country lovers’
: letter from Neil Gunn to Nan Shepherd, 30 October 1945, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.

‘a traffic of love’
:
LM
, p. xliii.

‘Parochialism is universal … a man can fully experience’
: Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Parish and the Universe’, in
Collected Pruse
[
sic
] (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1967), pp. 281–3.


irradiate the common … make something universal’
: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931.

‘lust … effect upon me’
:
LM
, pp. 8, 9, 107.

‘merely to be with the mountain … but to be with him’
: ibid., p. 15.

‘I am on the plateau again … stay up here for a while’
: ibid., p. 22

‘The plateau is the true summit … eddies on the plateau surface’
: ibid., p. 2.

‘a legendary task, which heroes, not men, accomplished’
: ibid., p. 107.

‘thirled me for life to the mountain’
: ibid., p. 107.

‘Birch needs rain … can be as good as drunk with it’
: ibid., p. 53.

‘the coil over coil … leggy shadow-skeleton’
: ibid., pp. 61, 52, 65.

‘Beech bud-sheaths … brightness to the dusty roads of May’
: ‘The Colour of Deeside’, Nan Shepherd,
Deeside Field
8 (1937), 9.

‘bland as silk … rooted far down in their immobility’
:
LM
, pp. 93, 92.

‘I knew when I had looked … hardly begun to see’
: ibid., p. 11.

‘the eye sees what it didn’t … whose working is dimly understood’
: ibid., p. 106.

‘snow skeleton, attached to nothing’
: ibid., p. 42.

‘I could have sworn I saw … I never saw it again’
: ibid., p. 2.

‘Such illusions … but steadies us again’
: ibid., p. 101.

‘impossible to coerce

: ibid., p. 91.

‘On one toils … toil[s] upwards’
: ibid., pp. 10, 16.

‘as the earth must see itself’
: ibid., p. 11.

‘twisted and intertwined … secret of their formation’
: ibid., pp. 55, 57, 69, 33.

‘interlaced … frozen floor of a hollow’
: ibid., p. 70.

‘interlocks … hidden hollow’
: ibid., pp. 70, 106, 72.

‘patiently adds fact to fact’
: ibid., p. 58.

‘Slowly I have found my way in … I should know’
: ibid., p. 105.

‘too much … resumed formation and direction’
: ibid., pp. 28, 70.

‘The mind cannot carry away all … what it has carried away’
: ibid., p. 3.

‘strong white … limber’
: ibid., pp. 23, 98, 102, 51, 92.

‘That’s the way to see the world: in our own bodies’
: Gary Snyder,
The Practice of the Wild
(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 106.

‘roaring scourge … purple as a boozer’s’
:
LM
, pp. 1, 44, 36.

‘boys … high-spirited and happy report’
: ibid., p. 39.

‘the body may be said to think’
: ibid., p. 105.

‘incarnates … medium for having a world’
: Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception
, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962),
passim
, but see especially pp. 144–6.

‘something moves between me and it … except by recounting it’
:
LM
, p. 8.

‘The body is not … identity for the hand as much as for the eye’
: ibid., pp. 106, 103.

‘This is the innocence we have lost … all the way through’
: ibid., p. 105.

‘out of the body … soil of the earth’
: ibid., pp. 106, 92.

‘one has been in … That is all’
: ibid., p. 92.

‘coveted knowledge … pursuit of learning’
: Donald, ‘Nan Shepherd’, 20.

‘I can see the wood … that reverberates/illuminates’
: letters from Nan Shepherd to Barbara Balmer, 15 January and 2 February 1981, private collection.

‘reticent about herself … grace of the soul’
: Jessie Kesson, quoted in Forrest, ‘In Search of Nan Shepherd’, 19.

‘striking power … he said yes to life’
: Nan Shepherd, Introduction to Charles Murray,
Last Poems
(Aberdeen: Charles Murray Trust/Aberdeen University Press, 1970), p. ix.

‘I hope it is true for those … has been so good, so fulfilling’
: Nan Shepherd, quoted in Forrest, ‘In Search of Nan Shepherd’, 19.

‘a peerer into corners’
:
LM
, p. xlii.

‘recesses’
: ibid., p. 9.

‘It cannot be seen until one stands almost on its lip’
: ibid., p. 10.

‘The sound of all this moving water is as integral … a dozen different notes at once’
: ibid., p. 26.

‘journey to the source … and flowed away’
: ibid., p. 23.

‘total mountain … being’
: ibid., p. 105.

Chapter 4: The Woods and the Water

‘part-islanded’
:
WW
, p. 4.

‘a great inland sea … the pleasures of living beside it’
: ibid.

‘sit[s] lightly on the sea … like an upturned boat’
: ibid., p. 8.

‘It’s extraordinary what you see in an English moat’
: Roger Deakin,
The Garden
, BBC Radio 4.

‘All water … holds memory and the space to think’
:
NFWTF
, p. 186.

‘frog’s-eye view’
:
WL
, p. 1.

‘1
.
The action or fact of flowing in … thus flows in or is infused’
:
OED
online.

‘a spring in your step’
: Heathcote Williams, ‘It’s the Plunge That Counts’,
London Review of Books
21:16, 19 August 1999.

‘like weeds … spontaneous and unstoppable’
:
NFWTF
, p. 63.

‘slip-shape’
: Alice Oswald,
Dart
(London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 48.

‘Searching the map, I had seen … slabs of slate hollowed into baths’
:
WL
, p. 91.

‘when we try to pick out anything … hitched to the whole world’
: John Muir,
My First Summer in the Sierra
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), in
NW
, p. 245.

‘I threw myself in … crawled out onto the beach like a turtle’
:
WL
, p. 131.

‘To enter a wood is to pass … paradoxically, by getting lost’
:
WW
, p. x.

‘The woods and the water … for us to understand more thoroughly’
: Roger Deakin, unpublished notebook entry.

‘fifth element’
:
WW
, p. ix.

Other books

Old School by O'Shea, Daniel B.
The Cat's Pajamas by Ray Bradbury
Blackmail by Robin Caroll
Dark Beauty (Seeker) by Browning, Taryn
Pursuit of the Apocalypse by Benjamin Wallace