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The Wild Places

Book by Robert Macfarlane · 6 quotes · Nature, Wilderness, Hiking

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The Wild Places Quotes

“Unmistakably, the wild land of the Lake District acted for good upon Coleridge. As he moved between the crags and cataracts, over the fells and the moors, and through the pathless wilds, a sense of joy - joy, the 'beautiful and beauty-making power' as he had longingly called it during the dark spring of 1802 - began to seep back into him. Walking over soft mossy ground on the slopes of Red Pike - 'a dolphin-shaped Peak of a deep red' that rises to the south-west of Buttermere - he gave 'many a hop, skip, & jump'. Up on the mountains that year, he found not the 'Darkness & Dimness & a bewildering Shame, and Pain that is utterly Lord over us' which had characterised his depression, but instead, a 'fantastic Pleasure, that draws the Soul along swimming through the air in many shapes, even as a Flight of Starlings in a Wind!”

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“On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world. The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.”

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“I could not now say when I first grew to love the wild, only that I did, and that a need for it will always remain strong in me. As a child, whenever I read the word, it conjured images of wide spaces, remote and figureless. Isolated islands off Atlantic coasts. Unbounded forests, and blue snow-light falling on to drifts marked with the paw-prints of wolves. Frost-shattered summits and corries holding lochs of great depth. And this was the vision of a wild place that had stayed with me: somewhere boreal, wintry, vast, isolated, elemental, demanding of the traveller in its asperities. To reach a wild place was, for me, to step outside human history.”

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“I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountain 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.”

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“On the north-western coasts of Britain and Ireland, the air has a remarkable transparency, for it is almost free of particulate matter. Little loose dust rises from the wet land, and the winds blow prevailingly off the sea. Through such air, photons can proceed without obstacle. The light moves, unscattered, and falls upon the forms and objects of those regions with candour. Standing within such a light, you feel thankful for its openness. There is a sense of something having been freely given, without its store having been diminished.”

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