How ‘Is a River Alive?’ Author Robert Macfarlane Found Himself an Elder

How ‘Is a River Alive?’ author Robert Macfarlane found himself an elder

Robert Macfarlane was out in the mountains climbing with his older son recently when the teen asked him, “So Dad, when are gonna write your memoirs?” “And I was like, ‘I’ve been writing them for 21 years,” laughs Macfarlane. “It’s just you haven’t read them.” If so, Macfarlane’s 19-year-old may be the only person who hasn’t been reading the author, whose new book “Is a River Alive?” is out now. Macfarlane has become one of the most popular write…

How Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘Is a River Alive?’ delivers a call to action

Robert Macfarlane has climbed to the icy summits of windswept mountains and plunged into the darkened depths of the earth to research his books, and he says that may have given people the impression that he was a bit of a loner. “There was a time, maybe 15, 20 years ago, when I was reputed as somebody who wrote about being alone — and alone and enraptured, let’s say. And possibly that was briefly true,” says Macfarlane, whose early author portra…

Imagine Water Otherwise: Robert Macfarlane on the Personhood of Rivers and the Meaning of Aliveness

“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned w…