Soren Kierkegaard spoke of every day being able to walk himself "into a state of well-being, away from every illness & into his best thoughts." Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot is a book that endorses the therapeutic value of walking but in particular, following the old & sometimes ancient pathways within the U.K., especially the Hebrides and to points well beyond, including Spain, Palestine & Tibet. Macfarlane was born in Halam, Nottinghamshire, and attended Nottingham High School. [1] He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He began a PhD at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2000, and in 2001 was elected a Fellow of the college. I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. The Old Ways was, for me, a bit like reading Richard Fortey's work. Non-fiction that I'm not necessarily very interested in, but which is beautifully written, lyrical, literate. It wasn't boring at all -- meditative, perhaps. Sometimes Macfarlane's a little too airy and mystical for me, too caught up in his imagination, but sometimes he comes round to something like Fortey, like the book I read recently on meditation, like Francis Pryor's book about Seahenge and the ritual landscape.

This wish for a “between space,” somewhere sacred and apart from the present, halfway between the past and the future, where time is all one and all time is beautiful reminded me a great deal of T.S. Eliot, particularly his first quartet, with the bird in the garden inviting us into another world where the light dappled differently across the pool and witches’ ingredients lay in the moss at the feet of each tree. The Old Ways confirms Macfarlane's reputation as one of the most eloquent and observant of contemporary writers about nature' Scotland on Sunday Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. London and New York: Granta Books and Pantheon Books. 2003. ISBN 0375421807. Macfarlane’s method recalls W. G. Sebald’s literary meander down England’s southeast coast in “The Rings of Saturn.” Like Sebald, Macfarlane loves side stories, chance encounters that become vital portals into historical feeling. But despite this shared passion, Macfarlane adds a singular physical awareness. He exudes curiosity about the physiology of motion, about the way moving legs move the brain. Recuperating on a ridge after an arduous day, he observes that “my legs preserved a ghost sense of stride, a muscle memory of repeated action, and twitched forwards even as I rested.” And it comes with the added benefit of most relevant references to writers of all sorts – Wittgenstein, Keats, Hazlitt, George Borrow and, above all, to Edward Thomas.

Hobbies

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 has a rare physical intelligence and affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time: wonderful' Antony Gormley

Then there's Finlay MacLeod, "a fierce opponent of those he considers his fierce opponents", who rightly views geography and history as consubstantial (147):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.” Talking of war, many men returning from the first World War came home to England with no job or prospect of attaining reliable employment enough to support a family. I knew of this, however what I hadn’t realized was that “The life of the road was the only option available to them, and in the 20-years after the war there was a substantial tramping population on the road sleeping out and living rough. Plumes of smoke rose from copses and spinneys up and down the country as the woods became temporary homes to these shaken out casualties of conflict.” How tragic to give so much and then, come home to meander aimlessly without a purpose, or place to stay. When he arrives, Macfarlane is instructed by Blanco to choose three books from the library: these will correspond to his past, present and future. "You don't need to take much care," Blanco's wife Elena tells him with a smile, "because the books will choose you, not the other way around." A wonderfully meandering account of the author s peregrinations and perambulations through England, Scotland, Spain, Palestine, and Sichuan Macfarlane sparticular gift is his ability to bring a remarkably broad and varied range of voices to bear on his own pathways and to do so with a pleasingly impressionist yet tenderly precise style. Aengus Woods, themillions.com

Funds were also raised to place a copy in every hospice in Britain. The book is used by charities and carers working with dementia sufferers, refugees, survivors of domestic abuse, childhood cancer patients, and people in terminal care. It has been adapted for dance, outdoor theatre, choral music and classical music. In 2018 the new Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital at Stanmore opened its new building with four levels decorated with art and poems from The Lost Words. [17] It was the inspiration for Spell Songs, a folk music concert and album by musicians including Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis and Kris Drever. 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 ]

Christmas Gifts

The youngest of these figures, Macfarlane is the author of four works of nonfiction, most recently and triumphantly, “The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot,” an iconoclastic blend of natural history, travel writing and much more. “The Old Ways” takes us to some far-flung places — Buddhist trails in the eastern Himalayas, Spain’s Camino de Santiago, the occupied Palestinian territories — but mostly Macfarlane stays closer to home. Topographically and emotionally, his loosely assembled collection of walks is centered on two heartlands: southern England’s soft chalk downs and the unyielding Scottish north. With this mastery of both travel and nature writing he brings together into confluence two great streams of British nonfiction. There are echoes here of Roger Deakin, Ted Hughes and WG Sebald, and, more faintly, of their American counterparts, Peter Matthiessen and Barry Lopez. But Macfarlane seems to have learned especially from the careful observation and incandescent prose of one of his heroes, JA Baker, the anonymous Essex librarian who wrote one of the great classics of 20th-century nature writing, The Peregrine, a book that Macfarlane has championed and for whose US edition he wrote a fine introduction.

What I like about this is that it helps me to see the land and the biosphere, feel the land and its life in my body, to relate myself to the land, even in memory, and in the future. As Naomi Klein puts it in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, love will save this place. And for many of Robert's fellow British, who have been (what Klein, again, calls) rootless consumers for most of our lives, feeling connected to the land (other than in a proprietorial or nationalistic way I guess) might be something we can't even remember, something we have to learn like a new language... winner". authorsclub.co.uk. Archived from the original on 25 December 2014 . Retrieved 24 December 2014. 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.Waterstones Book of the Year shortlist announced..." waterstones.com. Archived from the original on 27 December 2012. 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. 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. The book is a nice mix of personal reflection, narration, and history. Included are extended anecdotes about other great "walkers," including the painter Eric Ravilious and the poet Edward Thomas, both victims of wars. Shortlist for 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize announced - Samuel Johnson Prize". thesamueljohnsonprize.co.uk . Retrieved 15 May 2015.