Landmarks Read Free Page A

become a reader. Every hour spent reading is an hour spent learning to write; this continues to be true throughout a writer’s life.
The Living Mountain
,
Waterlog
,
The Peregrine
,
Arctic Dreams
,
My First Summer in the Sierra
: these are among the books that have taught me to write, but also the books that have taught me to see. In that respect,
Landmarks
is a record of my own pupillage, if the word may be allowed to carry its senses both of ‘tuition’ and (in that ocular flicker) of ‘gaining vision’. Thus the book is filled with noticers and noticings. ‘The surface of the ground , so dull and forbidding at first sight,’ wrote Muir of the Sierra Nevada, in fact ‘shines and sparkles with crystals: mica, hornblende, feldspar, quartz, tourmaline … the radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling’. How typical of Muir to see dazzle where most would see dullness! Again and again in the chapters that follow you will encounter similar acts of ‘dazzling’ perception: Finlay MacLeod and Anne Campbell detailing the intricacies of theLewisian moor; Shepherd finding a micro-forest of lichens and heathers on the Cairngorm plateau; Baker scrying a skyful of birds; and Richard Jefferies pacing out a humble roadside verge in a London suburb, counting off sixty different wild flowers, from agrimony to yellow vetch.
    Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us. Sometimes these traces are so faint as to be imperceptible – tiny shifts in the weather of the spirit that do not register on the usual instruments. Mostly, these marks are temporary: we close a book, and for the next hour or two the world seems oddly brighter at its edges; or we are moved to a kindness or a meanness that would otherwise have gone unexpressed. Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we have left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates. The word
landmark
is from the Old English
landmearc
, meaning ‘an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one’s course’. John Smith, writing in his 1627
Sea Grammar
, gives us this definition: ‘A Land-marke is any Mountaine, Rocke, Church, Wind-mill or the like, that the Pilot can now by comparing one by another see how they beare by the compasse.’ Strong books and strong words can be landmarks in Smith’s sense – offering us a means both of establishing our location and of knowing how we ‘beare by the compasse’. Taken in sum, the chapters of
Landmarks
explore how reading can change minds, revise behaviour and shape perception. All of the writers here have altered their readers in some way. Some of these alterations are conspicuous and public: Muir’s essays convinced Theodore Roosevelt of the need to protect Yosemite and its sequoias, and massively to extend the National Park regions of America; Deakin’s
Waterlog
revolutionized open-water swimming in twenty-first-century Britain. Others are private and unmappable, manifesting in ways that are unmistakableto experience, but difficult to express – leaving our attention refocused, our sight freshly scintillated.
    Strange events occurred in the course of my travels for
Landmarks
– convergences that pressed at the limits of coincidence and tended to the eerie. You will read about them here: the discovery of the tunnel of swords and axes in Cumbria; the appearance of the Cambridge peregrines (first at sillion, then at sill); the experience of walking
into
the pages of Nan Shepherd’s
The Living Mountain
in the Cairngorms; the widening ripples of a forgotten word, found in a folder in Suffolk that had been left behind by a friend who had died; and then the discovery – told in the Postscript – on the day before I finished
Landmarks
that its originating dream had, almost, come true. In all of these incidents, life and language collapsed curiously into one another. I have tried to account for these collapses, but such events –