‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’
Those words from T.S. Eliot would make a fitting summary of Underland, the latest work from Robert Macfarlane, a leading figure in what is sometimes called ‘new nature writing’, one of the biggest publishing trends of the last decade or so.
On the surface, this is a book about what’s under the surface, ‘the worlds beneath our feet’, about which ‘we know so little’. Macfarlane recounts – in vivid, beautiful prose – a series of journeys underground, from cave systems in the Mendips to the catacombs under Paris and on to the glaciers of Greenland and the deep-sunk storage facilities for nuclear waste in Arctic Finland. It’s a book of explorations.
But ultimately it’s an exploration of something far closer to home – of humanity and our complex relationship with the world around us. It celebrates mankind’s capacity for great good – community, art, activism – whilst simultaneously ruing our capacity for great harm – greed, consumption, and the casual disregard for the generations that will follow us. Fittingly, the book concludes only a mile or so from Macfarlane’s Cambridge home, in a poignant shared moment with his four-year-old son. ‘We feel small in the universe, and together,’ he writes.
Underland is a thoughtful book, one that sets out to challenge the way many of us see our place in the world. As I’ve been reading it, I’ve been reflecting on three Psalms that reorient and re-place us, giving us God’s perspective on our place in the world.
Delight
Psalm 111:2, famously inscribed on the doors of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, says this: ‘Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them.’
To read Robert Macfarlane is to meet someone with an evident delight in the natural world, an insatiable curiosity and wonder. I wonder if there is a challenge here for us: do we, who know the great author and designer of it all, have as great a delight in His creation as we find in those who think it’s all a product of time and chance?
Humility
But we’re also prompted to ask the question of Psalm 8:4: ‘What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?’ Macfarlane’s feeling of smallness in the universe is a good dose of cosmic humility as far as it goes, but without the counterpoint of divine care for us – even to the point of God becoming one of us in Christ – it will ultimately lead us to existential despair. For us to really know our place, we need to know our God.
Homesickness
That is a theme that is prominent in Psalm 90 too. At one point in Underland, Macfarlane introduces us to the concept of ‘solastalgia’, which is (apparently!) a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’, or a ‘distinctive kind of homesickness’ for lost landscapes. He thinks of this as a particularly 21st-century anxiety, but I wonder if it is simply a species of the anxiety felt by all time-bound creatures.
Time is change, and change is loss. To be a creature in time is to be homesick. But the real answer to that feeling is not going to be found in preserving beautiful landscapes just as they always have been, noble as that effort may be, but in rooting our identity in the eternal, unchanging God, ‘our dwelling-place throughout all generations’, from before the mountains were formed to long after we have returned to dust. Our homesickness is a sign that God has placed eternity in our hearts.
The true end of all our exploring, then, will be to find ourselves in Him.
Dave Puttick is pastor of Mirfield Evangelical Church
UNDERLAND: A Deep Time Journey
By Robert Macfarlane
Hamish Hamilton. 496 pages. £20.00
ISBN 978 0 241 143 803
