Knowledge and movement

The first law, the first principle of ecology, is that everything is connected to everything else. The walker, mountaineer and environmentalist John Muir, who is the father of the American National Park System, has a line somewhere in one of his journals — I will get it slightly wrong — where he says, when we try to pick out any one thing in the universe, we find it hitched to everything else. This has always made absolute sense to me, and it is one reason why, as a writer and researcher, it has always been important to put my body in the way of place, to visit the places I have written about, to meet, to talk, to feel the weather — to understand how the parts of mountains, rivers, the people and the creatures who live in, and are enabled and enlivened by them, connect.

The period in which I have been living and writing has also been a period of increased disembodiment. Virtualization or digitization might be other names for what has happened. I still remember sending my first email when I was a student in Cambridge in the mid 90s, and back then I would never have imagined that I would spend, as I now do, probably eight hours of my day at a screen, sitting, talking to the black mirror of phone or laptop. My experience is one of many people's. We have lost touch with the world, contact with the world, as a daily part of lived experience.

Within the Western tradition, from Descartes onwards through what we call the Enlightenment, there has been a tendency to think of knowledge as that which is produced from within, and at some level confined by the skull, the brain. Descartes gives us the cogito. I actually think Descartes has had a pretty difficult time of it. He is often villainized as the father of rationalism and of dualism, but there was another Descartes, the Descartes who was very drawn by wonder. He says wonder is the first of all the passions. Broadly speaking, there has been a tendency to think of the mind as the only part of us that can know, that can produce and assess knowledge. Someone like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist whom I read when I was a graduate student, undoes that binary, refuses it entirely and sees knowledge as an ongoing weaving and unweaving co-production between the self and the world, between the body and the world.

I have always walked, loved walking — long-distance walking — mountaineering as well. What we call the approach in climbing has always been an interesting phase to me. In the late 2000s, I became particularly interested in the relationship between walking and knowledge, and I began several years, five years, of following paths — not roads, not hard tarmac roads, but footpaths around the world — seeing where they led, seeing who they brought me into contact with and using them as a means of navigating past, story, song, future and ideas.

When I was growing up as a young climber, I was obsessed with the peak. I was obsessed with risk, with adventure, with probably something a bit like glory. Then I read Nan Shepherd. That changed the ways I think about mountains, about mountaineering — indeed, probably about knowledge. Shepherd herself was mad, as she put it, for the tang of height when she was a young walker, a mountain girl in the Cairngorms in the early part of the 20th century.

I have had a number of mentors. Some of them I have never met — Nan Shepherd I have only read — and some I have read, met and lost. One of those, probably the most important of them, is a man called Roger Deakin, who was a swimmer, a filmmaker, an environmental activist and a writer, and he wrote a book called "Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey through Britain" before he died. Then, after his sudden death, I helped bring his second and third books, "Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees" and "Notes from Walnut Tree Farm", into the world, which was a very emotional process; this was back in the mid-2000s. Roger called himself once a collector of knowledge. I am not sure I believe him. He was more a tinkerer of knowledge. He would pick up pots and pans, interesting scraps of metal and thought, and he would gather them. I remember going to his house, and it was an old Elizabethan farmhouse that he had rebuilt himself from a ruin, and it had a spring-fed moat that he swam in; I swam in it with him. His house was full of pebbles and saplings, plants on windowsills and feathers, strange things he had collected. He put me in mind of Vladimir Nabokov, who said the process of writing a novel begins with the collecting of fluff, pebbles and feathers. I think he was a collector of knowledge in the sense of being haphazard, and I suppose there is an element of that haphazardness that rubbed off on me.

There is a line by the romantic poet William Blake, a mystic and painter, and he says the tree that moves some people to tears of joy is to others just a green thing that stands in the way. From the very beginning, I have always been interested in that projective overlay that is what we call landscape. Landscape, the word, comes into English from the Dutch in the 16th century. It comes from the school of Dutch landscape painting, landscape painters, and it means a unit of perception or even a unit of occupation. From the very beginning, that idea of landscape has been imbricated with the idea of seeing, of perspective, of perception, of human presence. Much of the work I have done, and so many others have done, is delaminating, teasing apart, the relationship between matter, the given world; land, the land of landscape; and scape, the scaping that we do, that we are always doing in our ongoing imaginative, emotional and bodily relationships with land, with place.

I have had a long interest in the mystical tradition. That might be the anonymous 14th-century poem “The Cloud of Unknowing,” or Pseudo-Dionysius, the Syrian mystic who became so popular in the Middle Ages. He talks about what has become known as the apophatic tradition, that there are things we cannot speak of. We can only speak of their negative, of what they are not, of speaking around them. Although I grew up within the Christian practice, I have never been a believer. If I were to follow a religion, it would be a polytheistic one and not a monotheistic one. Polytheism makes much more sense to me, and if I were to found a religion, it would probably be like Philip Larkin's. It would probably be a religion founded on water.

From the beginning, I have been interested in what is sometimes called, what I like to call, deep time. Deep time is a young phrase for a very old concept. It comes from John McPhee, the New Yorker writer who wrote these extraordinary books about American geology in the 70s and 80s. It refers to the dizzying expanses of planetary time that stretch behind us all the way back to the birth of the Earth, 4.3 to 6 billion years ago. Deep time also stretches ahead of us because the Earth will outlast us. In the mountains, you see deep time laid bare. That is where I first met it. When you look across space, you are also looking back in time. I have walked on rocks that are some of the oldest surface rocks on the planet, and you find them in the Outer Hebrides, the Western Isles and also up on the Canadian Shield in eastern Quebec. This has another extraordinary effect. It annihilates the human units of time. Aeons, epochs, they really destroy in one sense the second, minute, year and lifetime. They have another effect, or should have this effect, which is the more interesting one, to radicalize us, which is to recognize that we are the inheritors of billions of years of gift, of legacy-leaving, and that we in turn ourselves are legacy-leaving creatures, a legacy-leaving species; what we do now will shape the future to come. Deep time is both an aesthetic, a temporal thrill but also an ethical, even a political challenge.