Robert McFarlane > Quotes

“To be human means above all to bury,’ declares Robert Pogue Harrison in his study of burial practices, The Dominion of the Dead, boldly drawing on Vico’s suggestion that humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, meaning ‘burying, burial’, itself from humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘soil’.

We are, certainly, a burying species as well as a building species – and our predecessors were buriers too.”
― Robert McFarlane

“Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way of seeing such landscapes, it might be thought of as ‘occulting’: the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness. The Slovenian karst is an ‘occulting’ landscape in this sense, defined by the complex interplay of light and dark, of past pain and present beauty. I have walked through numerous occulting landscapes over the years: from the cleared valleys of northern Scotland, where the scattered stones of abandoned houses are oversung by skylarks; to the Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid, where a savage partisan war was fought among ancient pines, under the gaze of vultures; and to the disputed valleys of the Palestinian West Bank, where dog foxes slip through barbed wire. All of these landscapes offer the reassurance of nature’s return; all incite the discord of profound suffering coexisting with generous life.”
― Robert McFarlane

“That night, though, far out into the North Atlantic, there were no lights to be seen, for there was no shipping. The deep-water lanes that ducted the big freighters stayed much closer to the Lewis mainland. There was the Hebridean, 500 yards or so off our port stern, its green starboard lamp winking as it rose and fell in the waves. Otherwise, the only lights were celestial. The star-patterns, the grandiose slosh of the Milky Way. Jupiter, blazing low to the east, so brightly that it laid a lustrous track across the water, inviting us to step out onto its swaying surface. The moon, low, a waxing half, richly coloured – a red butter moon, setting down its own path on the water. The sea was full of luminescent plankton, so behind us purled our wake, a phosphorescent line of green and yellow bees, as if the hull were setting a hive aswarm beneath us. We were at the convergence of many paths of light, which flexed and moved with us as we headed north.”
― Robert McFarlane

“It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are
disappearing; rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that
once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads
to attention deficit. As we further deplete our ability to name, describe and
figure particular aspects of our places, our competence for understanding and
imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly
depleted. The ethno-linguist K. David Harrison bleakly declares that
language death means the loss of ‘long-cultivated knowledge that has guided
human–environment interaction for millennia … accumulated wisdom and
observations of generations of people about the natural world, plants,
animals, weather, soil. The loss [is] incalculable, the knowledge mostly
unrecoverable.’ Or as Tim Dee neatly puts it, ‘Without a name made in our
mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our
hearts.”
― Robert McFarlane

“Potawatomi, a Native American language of the Great Plains region, includes the word puhpowee, which might be translated as ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight’. In ‘all its technical vocabulary’, Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, ‘Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery.”
― Robert McFarlane

“Like Kimmerer, I wish for a language that recognizes and advances the animacy of the world, ‘the life that pulses through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms . . . well[ing] up all around us’. Like Kimmerer, I relish those aspects of discourse that extend being and sentience respectfully and flexibly beyond the usual bearers of such qualities. Like Kimmerer I believe that we need, now, a ‘grammar of animacy’. A modern predisposition to regard animacy as anomaly runs through what the poet Jeremy Prynne once called ‘mammal language’, by which he means the language that is used by humans, encoding intent, agency and muscular power deep in its grammar.”
― Robert McFarlane

“Dehumanization

But despite it all, they were people like you and me.

Who are you? The living thrown into the madness,

Killed with clubs and stabbed,

Here crucified and no cross for you.

But O, you humans,

Your bones in the bottomless pit,

They were people like you and me,

Killed in the golden freedom.

As you pass by, stop for a while,

Think of your wrists bleeding in the dark night,

Barbed wire wrapped around them,

As they, cursing, goad you on,

Beaten, naked, a corpse still living,

You can hear the blows of the rifle butts,

The screams, the groans, the terror turning into the sweetness

Of approaching death.

The fear, the pain, are vanishing,

The footsteps echoing towards the void.

In the bottomless pit countless numbers of them lie,
But despite it all: they were people like you and me.

PS: A curse be upon anyone who might attempt to erase this record.

Imagine yourself as victim, the poem orders its readers. Think yourself into the skin of another human, for then – sunk into a different being – you will surely find yourself unable to inflict suffering. It is as unsettling a text as I know: the vividness of the scene of execution it conjures, the curse it threatens as protection against its own erasure. The poem at once challenges and charges its reader, both forbidding and demanding response. Above all, it is a poem about compassion – about feeling as another feels. To the poem’s author, the darkness of the ‘bottomless pit’ represents the utter failure of empathy that characterized the war in those regions, as it must of necessity characterize war at all times and in all places.”
― Robert McFarlane

“My sense,’ I say to Christopher, ‘is that the search for dark matter has produced an elaborate, delicate edifice of presuppositions, and a network of worship sites, also known as laboratories, all dedicated to the search for an invisible universal entity which refuses to reveal itself. It seems to resemble what we call religion rather more than what we call science.’

‘I grew up as a very serious Christian,’ Christopher says. ‘Then I lost my faith almost entirely when I found physics. Now that faith has returned, but in a much-changed form. It’s true that we dark-matter researchers have less proof than other scientists in terms of what we seek to discover and what we believe we know. As to God? Well, if there were a divinity then it would be utterly separate from both scientific enquiry and human longing.’

He pauses again. It is not that this thinking is hard for him – he has moved down these paths before – but that he is picking each word with care.

‘No divinity in which I would wish to believe would declare itself by means of what we would recognize as evidence.’ He gestures at the data read-out. ‘If there is a god, we should not be able to find it. If I detected proof of a deity, I would distrust that deity on the grounds that a god should be smarter than that.”
― Robert McFarlane

“Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk
back to us in ways that they might. As we have enhanced our power to
determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us. We
find it hard to imagine nature outside a use-value framework. We have
become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to
evoke what it can do to us. The former is important; the latter is vital. Martin
Heidegger identified a version of this trend in 1954, observing that the rise of
technology and the technological imagination had converted what he called
‘the whole universe of beings’ into an undifferentiated ‘standing reserve’
(Bestand) of energy, available for any use to which humans choose to put it.
The rise of ‘standing reserve’ as a concept has bequeathed to us an
inadequate and unsatisfying relationship with the natural world, and with
ourselves too, because we have to encounter ourselves and our thoughts as
mysteries before we encounter them as service providers. We require things
to have their own lives if they are to enrich ours. But allegory as a mode has
settled inside us, and thrived: fungibility has replaced particularity.”
― Robert McFarlane

“In the early 1930s a Swiss astronomer called Fritz Zwicky was studying galaxy clusters through the telescopes of the California Institute of Technology when he noticed an anomaly of extraordinary implications. Clusters are groups of gravitationally bound galaxies, and Zwicky’s work involved measuring the speeds of revolution of individual galaxies in their orbits around the core of the cluster, in order to weigh the cluster as a whole. What Zwicky observed was that the galaxies were revolving much faster than expected, especially towards the outer reaches of the cluster. At such speeds, individual galaxies should have broken their gravitational hold on one another, dispersing the cluster.

There was, Zwicky determined, only one possible explanation. There had to be another source of gravity, powerful enough to hold the cluster together given the speeds of revolution of the observable bodies. But what could supply such huge gravitational field strength, sufficient to tether whole galaxies – and why could he not see this ‘missing mass’? Zwicky found no answers to his questions, but in asking them he began a hunt that continues today. His ‘missing mass’ is now known as ‘dark matter’ – and proving its existence and determining its qualities is one of the grail-quests of modern physics”
― Robert McFarlane

“We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.”
― Robert McFarlane

“We tend to imagine stone as inert matter, obdurate in its fixity. But here in the rift it feels instead like a liquid briefly paused in its flow. Seen in deep time, stone folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. Over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, levitates from seabed to summit. Down here, too, the boundaries between life and not-life are less clear. I think of the discovery of the bones in Aveline’s, shining with calcite, lying promiscuously, almost converted into stone . . . I slip out the whalebone owl, feel the Braille of its back, the arcs of its wings, thinking of how it had taken flight from a whale’s beached ribs. We are part mineral beings too – our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones – and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land. It is mineralization – the ability to convert calcium into bone – that allows us to walk upright, to be vertebrate, to fashion the skulls that shield our brains.”
― Robert McFarlane

“Noise is the trundle of everyday particles through the air, the din of the ordinary atomic world going about its business. Radioactivity is deafening noise. Cosmic-ray muons are noise. If you wish to listen for sounds so faint they may not exist at all, you can’t have someone playing the drums in your ear. To hear the breath of the birth of the universe, you must come below ground to what are, experimentally speaking, among the quietest places in the universe.”
― Robert McFarlane

“In Which Enchantment Is Practised
In 1917 the sociologist and philosopher Max Weber named ‘disenchantment’
(Entzauberung) as the distinctive injury of modernity. He defined
disenchantment as ‘the knowledge or belief that … there are no mysterious
incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle,
master all things by calculation’. For Weber, disenchantment was a function
of the rise of rationalism, which demanded the extirpation of dissenting
knowledge-kinds in favour of a single master-principle. It found its
expressions not just in human behaviour and policy – including the general
impulse to control nature – but also in emotional response. Weber noted the
widespread reduction of ‘wonder’ (for him the hallmark of enchantment, and in which state we are comfortable with not-knowing) and the corresponding
expansion of ‘will’ (for him the hallmark of disenchantment, and in which
state we are avid for authority). In modernity, mastery usurped mystery.”
― Robert McFarlane