From The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane
This is a beautifully written book, filled with well-wrought paragraphs like the second one below. I'm including the first because it provides context and is remarkable, too.
These were the markers, I realised, of a process that was continuously at work throughout these islands, and presumably throughout the world: the drawing of happiness from landscapes both large and small. Happiness, and the emotions that go by the collective noun of 'happiness': hope, joy, wonder, grace, tranquillity and others. Every day, millions of people found themselves deepened and dignified by their encounters with particular places.Most of these places, however, were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in the river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along -- these might be enough. Or fleeting experiences, transitory, but still site-specific: a sparrowhawk sculling low over a garden or street, or the fall of evening light on a stone, or a pigeon feather caught on a strand of spider's silk, and twirling in mid-air like a magic trick. Daily, people were brought to sudden states of awe by encounters such as these: encounters whose power to move us was beyond expression but also beyond denial. I remembered what Ishmael had said in Moby-Dick about the island of Kokovoko: 'It is not down in any maps; true places never are.'
This is a beautifully written book, filled with well-wrought paragraphs like the second one below. I'm including the first because it provides context and is remarkable, too.
These were the markers, I realised, of a process that was continuously at work throughout these islands, and presumably throughout the world: the drawing of happiness from landscapes both large and small. Happiness, and the emotions that go by the collective noun of 'happiness': hope, joy, wonder, grace, tranquillity and others. Every day, millions of people found themselves deepened and dignified by their encounters with particular places.Most of these places, however, were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in the river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along -- these might be enough. Or fleeting experiences, transitory, but still site-specific: a sparrowhawk sculling low over a garden or street, or the fall of evening light on a stone, or a pigeon feather caught on a strand of spider's silk, and twirling in mid-air like a magic trick. Daily, people were brought to sudden states of awe by encounters such as these: encounters whose power to move us was beyond expression but also beyond denial. I remembered what Ishmael had said in Moby-Dick about the island of Kokovoko: 'It is not down in any maps; true places never are.'