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.
Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.
Non-Indian writers usually say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged." Mixed-blood writers usually say "Creator, "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four- Legged, and Winged." Indian writers usually say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird."
If you look too closely at the form, you miss the Essence.
Science grows and Beauty dwindles.
While everything around me is ever changing, ever dying, there is underlying that change a living power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves and recreates.... For I can see in the midst of death, life persists, in the midst of untruth, truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists.
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
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