Find Beauty, Be Still - "Underland" a Book for our times

I wrapped up Underland today. Somehow it doesn't feel right to write about it right away but it has stirred up a lot of feelings inside me that I would feel better getting them out. When I purchased the book we were in pre-coronavirus era.  I had listened to some talks by Robert Macfarlane and I thought his writings would help me "slow down". Little did I know that life as we knew it would come to a grinding halt. The current situation therefore colored my reading of the book and maybe some day I would revisit it with a different viewpoint. (If you want to skip this review and just listen to Macfarlane - here is a talk about the book.)

I saw two main themes in the book. It is an ode to the underland which according to Macfarlane has three main functions: "shelter what is precious, yield what is valuable, and dispose what is harmful". The other theme is a gentle reminder to us to be good ancestors, not just good parents or grandparents, but ancestors which automatically lengthens our horizon. "Deep time" is a defining feature of the underland and at the very least the book is a call to think in those time periods.

Macfarlane is also a lover of language and he bemoans the loss of so many words from our language as we become disconnected from our landscape. The book is filled with so many beautiful phrases that one can read it simply for the love of the language. Macfarlane is also a seasoned adventure traveler and in this book he explores some of the fantastical places on earth - burial chambers in Mendips, dark matter research stations underground, understorey of forests, the catacombs of Paris invisible rivers in Italy, hollowed lands called foibes in Slovenia, prehistoric caves in Norway, glaciers in Greenland and finally radioactive disposal stations in Finland!

I have done a bit of travel and have had enough adventures just a bit outside my comfort zone to know what it means to experience the exhilaration albeit on a small scale. With each such adventure my language also expands a bit and accommodates new words. "Switchback" was a word I had never used until about 20 years back when I started hiking. Similarly crampons, moraine, moulins were not words in my vocabulary until I experienced glaciers. The only place where I experienced total darkness was in a cave in Sequoia National Park. Hiking in Rocky Mtn NP taught me the risks of hiking above "treeline" - another word that I rarely use. MacFarlane's adventures are 100X magnified. I know that I would never do anything like he did and I am thankful for his book as it took me to landmarks in some extreme landscapes that I would not dare to visit. This also meant he gave me new words to add to my vicarious vocabulary. Here is a short list, some of which are slang:

• derp = derelict + ruined places
• bunkerologists
• Cenote (Spanish) = sinkhole that is often flooded
• Wunderkammer = place where curiosities are exhibited
• doline = funnel shaped sinkhole
• okna (Slovenian) = point where water has worn a passage through a rock
• Karst = limestone landscape
• turlough = intermittent lake that wells up from underneath and drains dry in summer
• fluvial = of or found in a river
• foiba = sinkhole used for killings
• corrie / cirque = steep sided hollow at the head of a valley
• occulting = nautical term for light that flashes on and off
• scabious = a type of flower
• posthole = cut used to hold wood in place
• wind slab = layer of snow formed by wind 
• cornice = overhang of snow at edge of mountain
• zawn = deep and narrow sea inlet
• Rime ice = result of freezing fog
• katabatic wind = wind from higher elevation carrying higher density air
• bergschrund = type of crevasse that separates moving ice from fixed
• couloir = steep narrow gully

Made me look up Google Images and Wikipedia too many times and that's the only drawback of the book as he did not add any pictures. It was very hard to visualize - easier to imagine fantasy worlds / mythic worlds. This was harder especially when snow is involved as that's simply not my element. Our family doesn't ski and our snow adventures are limited to some snow shoeing, a couple of guided glacier walks for beginners. So I was glued to his adventures in Greenland and the North. With the warming temperatures he talks about how Greenlanders feel the soundscape of the glaciers has changed and they now experience a silence. The ice is a living, moving thing for them as opposed to a scary nemesis for me.

The book ends in Onkalo where humanity is trying to bury radioactive materials "in order to preserve the future" from the present. He contrasts that to the seed bank at Spitsbergen where we are preparing for a catastrophe when the Earth's biodiversity is lost. Both these acts are steps in becoming good ancestors. Somehow Macfarlane manages to leave us on an optimistic note. He quotes this passage from a book called "After Nature"

People are best able to change their ways when they find two things at once in nature; something to fear, a threat they must avoid, and also something to love a quality... which they can do their best to honor. Either impulse can stay the human hand, but the first stops it just short of being burnt or broken The second keeps the hand poised, extended in greeting or in an offer of peace. This gesture, is the beginning of collaboration among people but beyond us, in building our next home.

I believe we are at that point with the pandemic amidst us. What is needed is a spirit of collaboration to solve some of the big problems that we face. For now closeted in my home, I am trying to adopt a phrase that according to Macfarlane, W.H.Murray said after being released from POW camps in Germany and Italy

FIND BEAUTY, BE STILL