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“In his book Footsteps (1985), Richard Holmes compared the biographer's act to 'a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past'. What Holmes realized in the course of his own pursuits was that the footstepping biographer never actually reached his subject; only encountered at best the second-order suggestions of their earlier presence: glimpses of afterglow, retinal ghosts, psychic gossamer. 'You would never catch them,' cautioned Holmes, 'no, you would never quite catch them...” — Robert Macfarlane
In his book Footsteps (1985), Richard Holmes compared the biographer's act to 'a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past'. What Holmes realized in the course of his own pursuits was that the footstepping biographer never actually reached his subject; only encountered at best the second-order suggestions of their earlier presence: glimpses of afterglow, retinal ghosts, psychic gossamer. 'You would never catch them,' cautioned Holmes, 'no, you would never quite catch them...