The Gifts of Reading Read online

  There are five books that I give away again and again, and they are among the books that have struck me most forcefully. I try to make sure that I always have several copies stockpiled, ready to hand out. When I find a copy of one of them in a bookshop, I buy it to add to the gift pile, knowing that the right recipient will come along sooner or later. The five books are Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (care has to be taken with that one, I admit), A Time of Gifts (of course), J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine and Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, her slender masterpiece about the Cairngorm mountains of north-east Scotland. I’m not sure quite what that shortlist reveals of my personality. I think perhaps I shouldn’t enquire too deeply.

  Shepherd’s is the book I have given away most often over the years. Forty copies? Fifty? I couldn’t say. I once left a copy on a train, cursed when I realized I’d done so – then took comfort from the knowledge that a book lost by someone is often a book found by someone else (and hoped that Shepherd ended up in the hands of a reader rather than the bottom of a bin).

  The giving-away of a copy of The Living Mountain that I remember most clearly happened in the Lairig Ghru in October 2013. The Lairig Ghru is the glacial valley that cuts through the Cairngorms from north to south. Where the path led through a steep-sided stream-cut, and crossed the water at a stepping-stone ford, I met a young man with a heavy pack. He had stopped to fill his flask and look at his map. We fell into conversation. He was called Samuel and he was from Singapore. He spoke with distinctive fluency and candour. He had come to the Highlands to escape some kind of problem in his life, the nature of which he did not specify. He was planning to spend two nights out in the Cairngorms, though he had no fixed idea of his route. I gave him some advice about possible bothies he could stay in, and wild-camping spots he could seek out – and I also gave him the copy of The Living Mountain that I had with me, hoping it might keep him good company in hut or tent.

  A week or so later, Samuel emailed:

  After our meeting, my walk over the hills of the Cairngorms took me the rest of the day and proved to be the hardest thing I had ever done. It was a most humbling experience. Thank you, Robert, for sharing Nan Shepherd’s brilliant prose with me and for giving me your copy of the book. I started reading it on the train on my way back to St Andrews, slowly, savouring each word like honey. Every sentence was poignant to a degree that I had never experienced before. I wept as I read. Her sensitivity to the land and its humble creatures, humble forms, glorified through her vision and thoughts, resonated deeply with me. Thank you, thank you.

  To receive such an open-hearted email was itself a kind of gift, further proof of Hyde’s propositions that the gift can be transformative and that the act of giving encourages the onwards circulation of generosity. It reminded me also of Shepherd’s vision of nature itself as abounding with gifts: offering wonders and beauties but asking nothing of its recipients in return. ‘To see the Golden Eagle at close quarters,’ she writes in The Living Mountain:

  requires knowledge and patience – though sometimes it may be a gift, as when once, just as I reached a summit cairn, an eagle rose from the far side of it and swept up in majestic circles above my head: I have never been nearer to the king of birds.

  I recalled Nan’s account of that ‘gift’ again last autumn, when I walked across the Cairngorms with my father, from Braemar to Tomintoul. We camped on the north-eastern shoulder of Ben Avon at around 3,000 feet, tucking our tents into the lee of a group of the granite tors that bulge from the plateau of that mountain. There we were sheltered from the big north-westerly wind that had buffeted us during the day. Just before dusk, Dad was in his tent and I was watching the sunset through the cleft between two tors. Suddenly a golden eagle came sailing past from the north, stiff-winged, its huge primaries trembling in the gale, passing perhaps thirty feet from me at its closest point. ‘Dad! DAD! Get out here fast!’ But by the time he was out of the tent the eagle was gone, lost in the corries to the west. ‘Dad! You missed it! You won’t believe it! A golden eagle just flew right past me!’ And then, to our astonishment, another eagle appeared from the north, sailing past with stiff wings and trembling primaries, passing perhaps thirty feet from us at its closest point. Not one gift but two. I have never been nearer to the king of birds …

  *

  During the solitary months and years spent writing a book, it can be easy to forget that it will – if you are lucky – live a social life: that your book might enter the imaginations and memories of its readers and thrive there, that your book might be crammed into pockets or backpacks and carried up mountains or to foreign countries, or that your book might be given by one person to another. Perhaps the aspect of authorship I cherish most are the glimpses I get of how my books are themselves carried, or are themselves given. When I sign books after readings, people frequently want their copies inscribed as gifts. Would you make this out to my mother, who loves mountains? … to my brother, who lives in Calcutta? … to my best friend, who is ill? … to my father, who is no longer able to walk as far as he would wish …? Several times I’ve been asked to inscribe books to young children who can’t yet read: We want to give this book to them now, so it’s waiting for them when they’re ready for it. These conversations with readers, and the stories that arise from them, are among the strongest of the forces that keep me writing.

  As I work on this essay, over the Christmas of 2015, I know that a copy of my book The Wild Places is being sledge-hauled to the South Pole by a young Scottish adventurer called Luke Robertson, who is aiming to become the youngest Briton to ski there unassisted, unsupported and solo. Robertson’s sledge weighs seventeen stone, and he is dragging it for thirty-five days over 730 miles of snow and ice, in temperatures as low as -50°C, and winds as high as 100mph. Under such circumstances every ounce counts, and I felt impossibly proud when I found out that The Wild Places (paperback weight: 8.9oz) had earned its place on his sledge, and impossibly excited at the thought of my sentences being read out there on the crystal continent, under the endless daylight of the austral summer.

  *

  This story began with the gift of a book, and it ends with one too. After three days away in Edinburgh, Don came back to Cambridge to stay with us for another couple of nights. The break had allowed me to catch up with work – and to get my priorities straight. I took two days off from the PhD, and Don and I properly walked and talked: out to Granchester along the river path, round the colleges, and from bookshop to bookshop. In G. David’s I found a cut-price copy of Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems from Faber, which includes his extraordinary versions of ‘The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’, ‘Song of the Bowmen of Shu’, and Li Bai’s poems of departure, including the ‘Exile’s Letter’:

  And the wind lifting the song, and interrupting it,

  Tossing it up under the clouds.

  And all this comes to an end.

  And is not again to be met with.

  I bought the book and gave it to Don as a farewell present. For two years or so afterwards, we wrote often and sent books to each other, back and forth over the Atlantic. Then one day Don wrote to say that he had been diagnosed with cancer, and that it had been caught late. He’d already begun chemotherapy. ‘I have to go into this treatment room, Rob. I call it The Pain Room’, he said. ‘It’s the worst place in the world.’ I wrote more frequently, sent more books, sometimes two or three at a time. Don’s replies slowed down, then stopped.

  A year or so later, I got an email from an address I didn’t recognize. It was from Don’s daughter, Rachel, telling me that he had died. He had been glad to get the letters and books I had sent, she told me, even when he was no longer able to write back. ‘Reading kept him alive,’ she said, ‘right till the end.’

  THE BEGINNING

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published 2016

  Copyright © Robert Macfarlane, 2016

  Copyright © 1965 by Gary Snyder, from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems.

  Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Cover artwork, with kind permission, by Stanley Donwood

  ISBN: 978-0-241-98270-9