"Making Money", ("Old Ways")

[fiefoe]

Terry Pratchett and his Moist is always a good time.

• I wouldn't trust you with a bucket of water if my knickers were on fire!
• You get a wonderful view from the point of no return.
• Building a temple didn't mean you believed in gods, it just meant you believed in architecture.
• The Igor position on prayer is that it is nothing more than hope with a beat to it.
• They are tragic,' said Vetinari, 'and we laugh at their tragedy as we laugh at our own. The painted grin leers out at us from the darkness, mocking our insane belief in order, logic, status, the reality of reality. The mask knows that we are born on the banana skin that leads only to the open manhole cover of doom, and all we can hope for are the cheers of the crowd.
• “The money… will talk?' said Mr Spools carefully. <> 'Imps,' said Moist. 'They're only a sort of intelligent spell. They don't even have to have a shape. We'll print them on the higher denominations.”
• One of my predecessors used to have people torn apart by wild tortoises.
• If he could get the idea of paper money past them then he was home and, if not dry, then at least merely Moist.

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Robert Macfarlane has been pretty good at putting me to sleep. It's distracting to be always wondering how difficult it must be to translate this book into Chinese, and noting how many authors mentioned in here I want to read.

• It is an exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt ancient paths, of the tales that tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and trespass, of songlines and their singers and of the strange continents that exist within countries.
• The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1850)
• Wands of dogwood made zebra-hide of the path; hawthorn threw a lattice. The trees were frilled with snow, which lay to the depth of an inch or more on branches and twigs. The snow caused everything to exceed itself and the moonlight caused everything to double itself.
• The prehistoric trackways of the English Downs can still be traced because on their close chalky soil, hard-packed by centuries of trampling, daisies flourish.
• Thomas De Quincey estimated Wordsworth to have walked a total of 175,000–180,000 miles: Wordsworth’s notoriously knobbly legs, ‘pointedly condemned’ – in De Quincey’s catty phrase – ‘by all…female connoisseurs’,
• ‘My left hand hooks you round the waist,’ declared Walt Whitman – companionably, erotically, coercively – in Leaves of Grass (1855), ‘my right hand points to landscapes of continents, and a plain public road.’
• Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making.
• The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature – a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.
• (George Borrow) was legendary for formulating – in his pioneering work of para-autobiography, Lavengro (1851) – the wayfarer’s creed: There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?
• Hilaire Belloc strode from France to Italy, and wrote his bombastic pilgrim’s tale The Path to Rome (1902).
• Out of those years (Henry Williamson) wrested his masterpiece Tarka the Otter (1927) – every word of which was, as he put it, ‘chipped from the breastbone’.
• Paths were figured as rifts within which time might exist as pure surface, prone to weird morphologies, uncanny origami.
• Edward Thomas: essayist, soldier, singer, among the most significant of modern English poets
• I have long been fascinated by how people understand themselves using landscape, by the topographies of self we carry within us and by the maps we make with which to navigate these interior terrains. We think in metaphors drawn from place and sometimes those metaphors do not only adorn our thought, but actively produce it. Landscape, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase, can ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’.
• Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject – ‘Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value’ –
• to Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem ‘At the Fishhouses’, which passes into the ‘clear gray icy water’ of a Newfoundland harbour; water that is ‘like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’.... The three poems become restatements of each other – a print-trail or series of steps of their own.
• It has conjured politically suspect dreams of belonging: chalk as the authentically English substance, pure and hallowed, the gleaming southern sea cliffs offering both blazon and bastion to those arriving from elsewhere.


• There it joins the Ridgeway, which leads on through Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire – connecting Iron Age hill-forts, Bronze Age barrows and Neolithic burial chambers – and at last drops down to the sea at Dorset, thus linking the English Channel in the south to the Wash in the east.
• ‘What is astonishing to the point of uncanniness,’ writes Hauser finely of this image, ‘is the way in which these ancient features …secretly share the landscape with the living, as they go about their business.’
• ‘The eye that sees the things of today, and the ear that hears, the mind that contemplates or dreams,’ Thomas had written, ‘is itself an instrument of antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to apprehend …and perhaps …we are aware of …time in ways too difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher.’
• Those early-day miles were magical, up and down hills, through beech and coppice hazel woods, with a marine light in the beech woods that gave the feeling of walking in cool water. Among the trees, a taste of moss in the mouth; green silence.
• Areas of the Western Front, where Thomas would fight and die, were chalk landscapes, and one of the most affecting cultural outputs of the trench war was the land art that both German and British soldiers made there. ... but near Soissons there remain the outlines of fantastical female figures: cave drawings summoned from erotic dreams, there in the terrible dark.
• Otherwise, there was nothing except bronze sand and mercury water, and so we continued walking through the lustrous air, out onto the flats and back into the Mesolithic.
• Birmingham geologist Fred Shotton (who, among other distinctions, was dropped behind enemy lines to analyse the geology of the Normandy beachheads before the D-Day landings).
• All these forms possessed the S-shaped double bend that William Hogarth in 1753 christened the ‘ogee’ or ‘line of beauty’, exquisite in its functionless and repetitive elegance; a line that drew the eye onwards.
• by the elation that arose from the counter-intuition of walking securely on water. Out there, nothing could be only itself. The eye fed on false colour-values.
• Everywhere I looked were pivot-points and fulcrums, symmetries and proliferations: the thorax points of a winged world. Sand mimicked water, water mimicked sand, and the air duplicated the textures of both.
• I recall thought becoming sensational; the substance of landscape so influencing mind that mind’s own substance was altered.
• Staggering recent research into avian navigation has revealed that, by means of retinal proteins called cryptochromes, birds can actually see magnetic fields.
• feels that he ‘could be on the far side of the moon.’ That felt exactly right: the walk out to sea as a soft lunacy, a passage beyond this world.
• Estimates of the distances covered in a good sailing day by Viking ships range from 90 to 150 nautical miles, meaning that the trip from Bergen in Norway to the Shetlands could be done in two days,
• Each sea route, planned in the mind, exists first as anticipation, then as dissolving wake and then finally as logbook data.
• past the drug-money pleasure-gardens and castle of James Matheson, who in 1844 used half a million pounds of the money he made pushing opium to the Chinese to buy the whole island of Lewis.
• so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.
• Outline and texture slowly firming up: the islands and their guardian skerries seen as nibs, teeth, tables, gable ends, chapels. Geese coming over in lettersets.
• The light flimsy, filmy. The earth open on its hinges, unsure of its swing. The day fathomable and still.
• Lying there, I could still feel the day at sea, blood and water slopping about in my bag of skin, the tidal churn of my liquid body, a roll and sway in the skull.
• He explained the sociology of boat construction, the importance of having neighbourly or kindred materials next to each other.
• Its form is geological-brutalist. It is a jaggy black peak of gneiss, the topmost summit of a submarine mountain,
• St Ronan’s sister, Brenhilda, is alleged to have tried to live on Sula Sgeir: she was found dead with a seabird’s nest built inside her ribcage.
• The men still wrap rags around their heads at night to stop the earwigs that infest the bothies from crawling into their ears.
• at last into a darkness that seemed to lift from the sea rather than falling from the sky, starting as a black dye upon the surface and then wicking upwards into the cloudless air.
• The instruction rounded into a couplet – Sail on up by the old North Star; hold it steady between halyard and spar
• The sea was full of luminescent plankton, so behind us purled our wake, a phosphorescent line of green and yellow bees, as if the hull were setting a hive aswarm beneath us.
• laid flat like a model ship ready to pass through the mouth of a bottle before being sprung back upright by the tug of a thread,
• Cormorants stood cruciform on low rocks, drying their wings.