Entanglement ponderings en route to Crete

This is an extract of writing from last night during my journey.

 

Already entanglements had been leaping about in my mind as I read a chapter of The Old Ways – Robert Macfarlane before I left for Crete. Macfarlane describes several ‘islomaniacs’: ‘Tim Robinson's topographies of the Irish Aran islands, Nicolson on the Shiants and Lawrence Durrell on Corfu, as well as Nan Shepherd's study of her inland-island of the Cairngorm massif, and Gilbert White's record of his Hampshire parish of Selborne. All these people had been animated at first by the delusion of a comprehensive totality, the belief that they might come to know their chosen place utterly because of its boundedness. And all had, after long acquaintance, at last understood that familiarity with a place will lead not to absolute knowledge but only ever to further enquiry.'

He writes of Shepherd that ‘She did not relish her discoveries so much as her ignorance: "The mind cannot carry away all that the mountain has to give,' she wrote, 'nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’