Title: Underland Pdf A Deep Time Journey
Author: Robert Macfarlane
Published Date: 2019
Page: 384
An Amazon Best Book of June 2019: Heads-up to your inner Gilgamesh: "The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree." Starting with that sentence, Robert Macfarlane begins an exploration of the world beneath our feet. Where his earlier book The Old Ways explored landscape and its effects on human experience, Underland dives into catacombs, caves, nuclear waste facilities, and the land beneath Greenland's shrinking ice cap to delve into the darker recesses of our imaginations, a place where artists, adventurers, and criminals have traveled, willingly and otherwise. Expanding his journey into the realm of "deep time"—a parallel expanse of past and future almost unimaginable to human intellect, but also irresistible to contemplate—Macfarlane takes us from the moment of creation into a post-human future, one that might be better off without us. Add its stunning jacket by Stanley Donwood (who creates Radiohead album covers in his spare hours), Underland is a one-of-a-kind book, deeply thoughtful, richly written, and infinitely rewarding. —Jon Foro, Amazon Book Review “Mesmerizing…Underland is a portal of light in dark times.” - Terry Tempest Williams, New York Times Book Review“An excellent book―fearless and subtle, empathic and strange.” - Dwight Garner, The New York Times“Reading Macfarlane connects us to dazzling new worlds. It's a connection that brings, more than anything else, joy.” - Barbara J. King, NPR“Incantatory…A worthy companion to the historian Simon Schama’s monumental Landscape and Memory.” - Marcia Bjornerud, Wall Street Journal“Brilliant.” - Peter Fish, San Francisco Chronicle“Exquisite. ” - Ryan J. Haupt, Science“Quietly prophetic. ” - Jedediah Purdy, Atlantic“Profound in every sense of the word.” - Richard Powers“Underland is a devastating act of witness and a clear, cogent, lyrical examination of the darknesses invisible beneath our feet.” - Lauren Groff“Underland is a profound reckoning with humankind’s self-imperiled position in nature’s eternal order. At once thrilling and soulful, raw and erudite, it is a book of revelations.” - Philip Gourevitch
National Bestseller
From the best-selling, award-winning author of Landmarks and The Old Ways, a haunting voyage into the planet’s past and future.
Hailed as "the great nature writer of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), Robert Macfarlane is the celebrated author of books about the intersections of the human and the natural realms. In Underland, he delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.
In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestseller The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through “deep time”―the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present―he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk “hiding place” where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. Woven through Macfarlane’s own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the underland made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls “the awful darkness within the world.”
Global in its geography and written with great lyricism and power, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. Taking a deep-time view of our planet, Macfarlane here asks a vital and unsettling question: “Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?” Underland marks a new turn in Macfarlane’s long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart. From its remarkable opening pages to its deeply moving conclusion, it is a journey into wonder, loss, fear, and hope. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.
24 illustrationsDisappointed So far the best part is the colorful cover. This was a much anticipated read. I settled in and found my self wading into a molasses of facts and tidbits. I will continue, but find this to be quite a chore. Not at all like previous work.This is a gem of a book. This is my first excursion into the worlds Robert MacFarlane shares through his writing. I am appreciating the breadth of material from which he draws from in order to create a picture of the world under the soil. He succeeds in opening the door and drawing the reader into a fascinating world. We as the reader, are taken on a journey through time and space into what lies underground. These worlds are complex and interconnected. MacFarlane is able to create a tapestry that connects homo sapiens to and with the "underland". The images he creates and the story he tells, about us and the earth, in this book will stay with me for a long, long time.Fascinating and Scary What is the Underland? Of course, there are caves, caverns, underground rivers, and the labyrinths of mythology. But the Underland is more than natural wonders; parts of the Underworld are manmade, like the catacombs beneath Paris, nuclear waste repositories, mines, and cave paintings. And Robert Macfarlane wants to explore every inch of the Underland, no matter how remote or dangerous that dream becomes. To experience the Underland, he survives blizzards, freezing water, ice crevasses, blocked cave passages, and oxygen deprivation. The author’s obsession with all of the manifestations of the Underland, and his willingness to risk his life numerous times to experience it and write this book about it, approaches religious fervor. Numerous times he gets so carried away with his own feelings and ideas that he drifts into irrationality and sentimentality. He even admits it when he is caught up in the concept of the “wood wide web,” the mycorrhizal fungi network that connects all the roots of the plants in a forest. “Lying there among the trees, despite a learned wariness towards anthropomorphism,” he writes, “I find it hard not to imagine those arboreal relationships in terms of tenderness, generosity and even love: the respectful distance of their shy crowns, the kissing branches that have pleached with one another, the unseen connections forged by root and hyphae between seemingly distant trees.” This is not scientific writing; it is pure emotion, a belief system in the making. But his book is so enchanting that we forgive and forget the sentiment and can’t wait for his next Underland adventure. I get it and I still am moved by my own most interesting Underland experience. No, it wasn’t walking down an asphalt path to visit the Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns, it was being lowered in a large bucket a mile deep into a New Mexico uranium mine. That Underland was utterly fascinating and scary at the same time. Just like this book.
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