Ronald Blythe
A World Behind Our Own
The Wild Places must be the most eloquent tribute paid by a young naturalist to his mentor for many a long year. Robert Macfarlane was a friend of the wonderful Roger Deakin, who died last August. These fifteen perfect essays relating travels off the well-trodden paths sparkle like early morning. Their combination of physical and spiritual adventure creates a kind of peregrinating enchantment as, like Deakin, Macfarlane gets about the hard way. His body as well as his mind has been in close contact with the regions he describes, and in this he is like a new Edward Thomas or Coleridge, long-walkers who had to leave the main road in order to find themselves.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3