The Wild Places [Paperback]

I love books about travel, esp in Britain, and I love nature. So I thought this book might be the perfect match. I was not disappointed! First, the book is filled with detailed descriptions of what he is seeing, so that you are seeing it too. His writing reminds me much of Chet Raymo's. I was esp fascinated with the map he made of the wild areas he is exploring. Its a map that doesn't look like any you've ever seen. But it connects all of the places he is visiting, and shows how all of these places are indeed connected. The book isn't all nature - he weaves in local history, interesting people, and stories along the way. I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the topic. My only complaint is that the book is making me want to return to that land, and thats just not going to happen any time soon! But I took that trip vicariously thanks to his writting.

This book was so so beautiful. The author describes nature scenes so perfectly that it almost transports you the places being described. I especially loved the heartrending stories of individuals whose memories of favorite nature spots kept them sane in insane situations they found themselves in, such as war. One thing to be forewarned of, is that history and other stories are woven into the descriptions of beautiful places. I had at first thought of this as a nice relaxing "go to sleep" to book, then suddenly images of starvation or other terrible things are being described, so, it might not be a sleep time book. Kate

Robert Macfarlane here takes us on a noble and quixotic quest, to find "wild" places in the British Isles as well as Ireland. For any person who has lived or even visited almost anywhere there recently, it is obvious what an odd task the author has set before him in the isle of the roundabout (Americans read : "Traffic Circle"), the roads of which, by his own concession, if laid end to end, could take one almost to the moon. The author - somewhat shamefacedly - uses these roads to get to his wild destinations. It becomes evident that one is reading the work of a poetic stylist on the first page where: "Sunlight fell in bright sprees on the floor." All very well, but - I'm not trying to be hypercritical here, just taking note of the tenor of the book as it struck this reader - the book is more of a compendium of MacFarlane's excursions and varied and varying impressions of "wildness," as he motors back and forth from his home in Cambridge (where he is a Fellow) with wife and children to various remote corners for his encounters, only to rush back home to write about the place, the history of the place, the authors associated with the place and his interaction with the place in cosy Cambridge. The book is chock-full of these other writers and paragraph-long quotes from them, which let us know how erudite our author is, but not how wise. There IS a difference, you know.

There's a certain thread of mystical "Wildness Manichaeism," if I may so phrase it, which runs through a great deal of the book. It's wild or it's not, no greys. The author describes his experience of wildness (and that of many other authors) in several different places. But there's a heartfelt reluctance to define it. Macfarlane's wildness is definitely of the "I know it when I sense it" sort. The most illustrative passage of this is his experience in the Basin in the Scottish Highlands:

"To be in the Basin, even briefly, is to be reminded of the narrow limits of human perception, of the provisionality of your assumptions about the world. In such a place, your conventional units of chronology (the century, the life-span, the decade, the year, the day, the heartbeat) become all but imperceptible, and your individual gestures and impulses (the lift of a hand, the swimming stroke taken within water, the flash of anger, a turn of speech or thought) acquired an eerie quickness. The larger impulses of the human world - its wars, civilisations, eras - seem remote. Time in the Basin moves both too fast and too slowly for you to comprehend....The Basin keeps wild time."

While in search of wild time, Macfarlane informs us of many a thing of erudite interest, such as (in his ophthalmological discourse on noctambulation):

"It takes rod cells up to two hours to adapt most fully to the dark. Once the body detects reduced light levels, it begins generating a photosensitive chemical called rhodopsin, which builds up in the rod cells in a process known as dark adaptation."

All very fascinating, I'm sure you'll agree. But, still, inasmuch as there is a theme here it is Macfarlane's quest for the type of experience he quotes author Stephen Graham as having: "As you sit on a hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens."

Macfarlane doesn't hang about long enough for the great door to open for him. But this book constitutes an often fascinating series of jaunts in search of it.

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