Macfarlane, R., 2012, The Old Ways, Hamish Hamilton, London
- Author : Macfarlane, R.
- Year : 2012
- Title English : The Old Ways
- Publisher : Hamish Hamilton
- Publisher's Location : London
- ISBN : 978-0-241-14381-0
- Pages : 433
- Edition : Hb
- Comments : p. 26 "I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us, and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphores do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. Landscape, to borrow George Eliot's phrase, can 'enlarge the imagined range for the self to move in'. As I envisage it, landscape projects into us not like a jetty or peninsular, finite and bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays yet often quickening and illuminating. We are adept, if occasionally embarassed, at saying what we make of places - but we are far less good at saying what places make of us. For some time now it has seemed to me that the two questions we should ask of any strong landscape are these: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then, vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?"