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.
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.
Not all the blood of beasts On Jewish altars slain, Could give the guilty conscience peace, Or wash away the stain: But Christ, the heav'nly Lamb, Takes all our sins away, A sacrifice of nobler nam' And richer blood than they.
You know, they've got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you don't like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you don't like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. Now I just have to polish these off, and everything'll be OK. Life is a box of chocolates. I suppose you could call it a philosophy.
Observation and thinking are the two points of departure for all the spiritual striving of man, insofar as he is conscious of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two fundamental pillars of our spirit.
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