Best 5 quotes of Robert Moor on MyQuotes

Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree.

Complete freedom is not what a trail offers. Quite the opposite; a trail is a tactful reduction of options.

In walking, we acquire more of less.

I was discovering that this process works both ways: a journey is never simply the act of gaining a new perspective, but also the experience of being newly seen.

We move through this world on paths laid down long before we are born.