The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

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Prišla sam svom prvom čitanju Makfarlana s velikim optimizmom i nadom da će mi se svideti. Takoreći nije imalo šta da mi se ne svidi - knjiga o pešačenju i o pešačkim stazama kroz istoriju, delom putopis, delom meditacija, delom istorija filozofije pešačenja i još na sve to s fotografijama. Dodajmo da sam za autora čula preko njegovog istinski prelepog projekta Lost Words, ilustrovane knjige posvećene rečima izbačenim iz Oksfordskog rečnika za decu jer se "premalo koriste": žir, maslačak, vodomar, vrba...

How do I reach into my grab-bag of dozens of highlighted passages and do justice to this telling without boring you? I can't — but I can't resist sharing anyway, and hoping that I choose wisely enough to convince you to read more: Sublime... It sets the imagination tingling, laying an irresistible trail for readers to follow' Sunday Times Macfarlane's 2012 book Holloway was adapted into a short film shot on Super-8 by the film-maker Adam Scovell. The finest essay writing about ways -- paths both terra firma, water, sand, snow, and ice. Each chapter is a separate work, and Macfarlane interweaves his story of experiencing the path and introduces the reader to past travelers and present masters of the path. Moments of the most brilliant prose (naturalist perspective) I have ever read. Sentences I would read again and again for their freshness and astounding organization. "The moon, low, a waxing half, richly coloured -- a red-butter moon, setting down its own path on the water. The sea full of luminescent plankton, so behind us purled our wake, a phosphorescent line of green and yellow bees, as if the hull were setting a hive swarm beneath us. We were at the convergence of many paths of light, which flexed and moved with us as we are headed north" (134).He goes on to write “The consolation of recollected places finds its expression frequently in the accounts of those exiles, prisoners, the ill, the elderly who can no longer physically reach the places that sustain them. When Edward Thomas travelled to fight on the Western Front the memories of his south country were among the things he carried.” This book is a meditation on how journeys are never just about getting from one place to another. Every land or seascape poses vistas to observe, problems to overcome, and reminders of deep time. Although most of the trips he describes take place in the British Isles, he goes as far afield as Palestine and Tibet. For me, in fact, those distant walks were the most interesting part of the book. In Palestine you have to break the law just to live, and in Tibet the sheer struggle for survival seems to highlight the majesty of limitless mountains and endless time. Anyway; somewhat more highly recommended than my rating indicates. If you are interested in walking, in premodern paths, or in British landscape you will probably enjoy reading at least a few chapters. There isn't much of a progression, more a meandering of thought, so no pressure to complete the book.

Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year | Book awards | LibraryThing". www.librarything.com . Retrieved 20 January 2022. a b "The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape". The Guardian. 27 February 2015 . Retrieved 5 May 2019. 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 He is a patron of the Outdoor Swimming Society, the Outlandia Project, ONCA (One Network for Conservation and the Arts), and Gateway To Nature, a Lottery-funded mental-health initiative designed to improve access to nature for vulnerable groups and individuals. He is a founding Trustee of the charity Action For Conservation, which works to inspire a lifelong engagement with conservation in 12–17 year olds, working especially with schools with high pupil premium levels.This book took me so long to read because McFarland took me to places I knew nothing about, so I “had to” do a lot of side-reading, a leading indicator on how much I am going to love a book. His sensibilities about place and our interaction with it, being in and passing through a place, putting our being there, were wonderful to share. I highlighted many passages that are quite moving and here is one. “Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.” Walking a path connects us to others who came before and those who come after us. Thomas, says Macfarlane, experienced “the tension between roaming and homing”. He writes: “Thomas used the old ways to keep himself in motion, for like George Borrow – whose biography he wrote and with whom he closely identified – he was depressive”. A marvellous marriage of scholarship, imagination and evocation of place. I always feel exhilarated after reading Macfarlane' Penelope Lively He has also published many reportage and travel essays in magazines, especially Granta and Archipelago, as well as numerous introductory essays to reissues of lost and neglected classics of landscape and nature writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, notably J. A. Baker ( The Peregrine) and Nan Shepherd ( The Living Mountain and In The Cairngorms).