This is a book which is sometimes so private that reading it seems very nearly like an act of invasiveness. There is nothing salacious or rude in it, but its tone of voice is whispered, intimate, as though the reader were an interloper, a clumsy stumbler into the most secret thoughts of the author.
Its occasion is a walk down the River Ouse in Sussex, from its source in the High Weald to the sea at Newhaven, but its substance is only marginally to do with that simple and very ordinary bit of geography. The river becomes the thinnest of wire coat-hangers on which almost anything can be hung. The result is a meditation, a drifting sequence of thoughts on time and change, on loss, love and meaning, on hell and happiness, geology and evolution, science and poetry.
The grandfather of the form is Rousseau, whose 1770s Reveries of the Solitary Walker created the flâneur, the wandering thinker, the man who had learned too much, who only saw the world through the books he had read or half-read, who felt very, very lonely and not entirely connected to the rest of humanity, who felt there was more life in the half-random fragments that came drifting up on a walk than in any systematic take on the structure of things.
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