“Why go low? It is a counter-intuitive action, running against the grain of sense and the gradient of the spirit. Deliberately to place something in the underland is almost always a strategy to shield it from easy view. Actively to retrieve somethin from the underland almost always requires effortful work. The underland’s difficulty of access has long made it a means of symbolizing what cannot openly be said or seen: loss, grief, the mind’s obscure depths, and what Elaine Scarry calls the ‘deep subterranean fact’ of physical pain.”
- Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey.
Category: underland: a deep time journey
“Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not…”
“Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism, I find it hard not to imagine these arboreal relations in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees. I remember something Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: “we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.” […] I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings.”
- Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey.
- Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey.