Underland
A Deep Time Journey
Robert Macfarlane
Having read it
★★★★☆
A brilliant read and a fantastic view into the underland. However, it did seem to drag a little toward the end and became a bit of a tough read. Enjoyable, certainly at the beginning, but I think that the repetition of place, not the writing, got a little tiring. Despite all that, well worth a read and I’m glad I made the effort.
A good passage
But the Anthropocene, for all its faults, also issues a powerful shock and challenges to our self-perception as a species. It exposes both the limits of our control over the long-term processes of the planet, and the magnitude of the consequences of our activities. It lares bare some of the cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exists between us and other beings now, as well as between humans and more-than humans still to come. Perhaps above all the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscape we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underhands. What is the history of things to come? What will be our future fossils? As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jona Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’
A second good passage
There are only two points close to Kollhellaren where I can cross the Wall in winter. Both present difficulties in these conditions. One is a gully that cuts up below an adze-shaped peak named Mannen. The other ascends a slabbed shoulder of peak. I consider them on a map. The gully is much steeper, but will probably hold less snow. The shoulder is a less severe slope, but looks more avalanche-prone. I decide on the gully. I like gullies. They hold you. You feel you’re likely to fall less far. They’re more comforting than ridges or shoulders, even the they’re more dangerous.
A third good passage
‘Have you noticed,’ says Helen M, ‘how the stars show in greater numbers through the aurora?’ She is right. I would have expected the Northern Lights to make the stars less visible, rather than more – the excess of light cancelling out the stars’ glimmer. But instead it has the counter-intuitive effect of causing more stars to show, clusters of them, which vanish back into the blackness when the aurora flickers away. None of us can explain how the green light could be collaborative rather than competitive with the starlight