The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Product Information

It has so far been a quarter of a century in the making, and at last count it consisted of more than 1,100 books — though its books are not only books, but also reliquaries. Each book records a journey made by walking, and each contains the natural objects and substances gathered along that particular path: seaweed, snakeskin, mica flakes, crystals of quartz, sea beans, lightning-scorched pine timber, the wing of a grey partridge, pillows of moss, worked flint, cubes of pyrite, pollen, resin, acorn cups, the leaves of holm oak, beach, elm. (239) 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." Reading Robert MacFarlane’s book was like learning how to walk again – walking like the most present-minded Buddhist on the earth after you’ve been awarded a university education and read thousands of books. MacFarlane is the most erudite lover of topography I’ve ever read. More knowledgeable than Thoreau's Walden, more interesting than Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, and more inspiring than a High Sierra trail guide, this book shows the reader a way to see while you're on the journey. 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. Macfarlane explores the meditative aspects of being a pedestrian not so much a travelogue as a travel meditation, it favors lush prose, colorful digressions if you ve ever had the experience, while walking, of an elusive thought finally coming clear or an inspiration surfacing after a long struggle, "The Old Ways" will speak to you eloquently and persuasively. "The Seattle Times"

The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane | Waterstones The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane | Waterstones

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.” But even despite my poor reading plan the power of his passion was enough to carry me through, as he tells us over and over to take one more look, just one, at what we have around us, and does it with such a lovely passion that it is usually not a strain to listen one more time: For some time now it has seemed to me that two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I m in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?” It is not just about walking, journeys on foot. One surprising journey was sailing, on ancient sea roads which, he writes, 'are dissolving paths whose passage leaves no trace beyond a wake, a brief turbulence astern. they survive as convention, tradition, as a sequence of coordinates, as a series of way marks, as dotted lines on charts and as stories and songs' (p88)..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.”

The Old Ways,’ by Robert Macfarlane - The New York Times ‘The Old Ways,’ by Robert Macfarlane - The New York Times

There is a humility to the act of the kora, which stands as a corrective to the self-exaltation of the mountaineer’s hunger for an utmost point. Circle and circuit, potentially endless, stand against the symbolic finality of the summit. The pilgrim on the kora contents himself always with looking up and inwards to mystery, where the mountaineer longs to look down and outwards onto knowledge.” 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.I didn't enjoy this book at all. I thought it was as boring as it was well-written. Walking isn't a subject that interests me much, but the location and history of the walks does. There was too much about the minutae of the walks - long lists of every kind of plant and a thesaurusful of synonyms. The author is in love with words for words sake. I'm not, I like the words to go somewhere, and these didn't for me. 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...