Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Some sentences from Robert Macfarlane


Some striking sentences from Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

In the wind and the sun, the wood is a light box. The big beeches, with their early green leaves, form a roof made of stained glass: a Gothic church interior, constantly shifting and reconfiguring itself. (191)

Our plan is to follow that river -- in kayak and foot -- for a hundred miles or so south through the forest, to its mouth at the sea: a hard journey of ten to fourteen days, if all goes well. (199)

Other times, something more like 'Wayne Radio' occurs: the mouth-vent opens and psychic convection currents start bringing up weird exfluvia from his brain's core-mantle boundary: funny noises, repetitions of words, bizarre accents, abysmal puns, arcane trivia, fragments of old poems, etc.  (202)

He's the son of a Marine Corps fighter-pilot, so as a kid his family shifted around from air station to air station. He moved home fourteen times in eighteen years: no stability, no permanence." (209)

River, rock, forest, mist. A raven, hexing. (277) 

If the cloud-forest was a place of reticulation, and Chennai one of circulation between waterbodies, the Mutehekau Shipu's mode is, surely, purely flow, I think, and its grammar of animacy is one of ands and throughs and tos and nows, of commas not full stops, of thens not buts, aura not edge, of compounds and hyphens and fusings, silver-blues and grey-greens and mist-drifts and undersongs, process not substance, this joined to that, always onrushing, always seeking the sea and here and there turning back upon itself, intervolving, eddying in counterflow to cause spirals and gyres that draw breath into water, life into the mind, spin strange reciprocities, leave the whole world whirled, whorled. (289). [here in full river syntax mode]

On This Day (09/16):

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