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The old ways a journey on foot5/18/2023 ![]() He describes this as "the third book in a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart", and that "loose" means it doesn't matter which order you read them in, or if you only read one. He has managed, as far as I can see, to avoid repeating himself even as he revisits previous haunts. In his chapter on walking in the Himalayas, he quotes a companion on the concept of darshan, a Sanskrit word that "suggests a face-to-face encounter with the sacred on earth with a physical manifestation of the holy", and we are reminded that the Sherpas who accompanied the first expeditions had no word to describe the summit of a mountain, as that was where the gods lived, so it would be blasphemous even to try to reach one.īut here, unlike in Mountains of the Mind, Macfarlane is more interested in passes and paths than in summits. We are spared that kind of scene here, I am pleased to report, and I must also add that "godforsaken" is pretty much the last word Macfarlane would use to describe a mountain. His second book, The Wild Places, tried to get as close to wilderness as these islands can provide I have not read his first, Mountains of the Mind, because of a review that said he describes whittling his frozen fingers with a penknife while crawling up, or down, some godforsaken peak. ![]() Macfarlane tends to prefer the wilder and woollier environments. ![]()
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