Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.
Interpretation
This quote suggests a duality in the nature of those who seek high places, balancing self-admiration and a desire for escape.
Robert Macfarlane's quote explores the complex motivations behind why people seek out high places, such as mountain-tops. It implies that while travelers are often drawn to the majesty and beauty of these locations, there is an inherent self-love in their pursuit, as well as a desire to escape the mundane or to detach from reality, represented by 'oblivion'. This dual attraction reflects the intertwined relationship between self-reflection and the quest for deeper truths found in nature.
In practice
During a motivational speech about self-discovery and exploration.
As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker's feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.
All travelers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world's disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates.
If you don't want your tax dollars to help the poor, then stop saying that you want a country based on Christian values. Because you don't!
If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.
It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
Pride is a vice, which pride itself inclines every man to find in others, and to overlook in himself
Man, a mere inhabitant of the earth, cannot overstep its boundaries! But though he is confined to its crust, he may penetrate into all its secrets.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.