Robert Macfarlane on Landscape and the Human Heart
Intelligence Squared
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The Politics of Walking
Walking was for Raja Shahada a kind of civil disobedience and I was fascinated by the politics of walking as well as by its aesthetics. The immediacy of that experience was to him a different way of defeating the occupation, it was a way in fact of avoiding politics which had infiltrated his life so totally, totally. That spoke very powerfully to me though we found it very hard to avoid politics for any length of time. He also became over all the years my walking increasingly interested in pilgrimage as a practice and as a metaphor because it is on pilgrimage that we most explicitly allow places to know us. And then he ended up in Spain like many English walkers before himself where he found his
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