landscape & the human heart

i think i've found a new writerly idol. Not in the mad impassioned almost-irrational way i was obsessed with Coetzee; nor in the awed-by-the-luminous way i loved (and still love) Marilynne Robinson; and not in the i-want-to-live-and-write-like-he-did way i fell for Alistair MacLeod's short stories.
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i think the thing about Robert MacFarlane's work is that he has been, is still, asking the same questions i've been asking in my own work for the last 2 or 3 years. There's a sense of familiarity in the encounter, a sense that this writer is someone i can have a dialogue with, while at the same time admiring his writing and knowing it will be a long time before i even come close to writing like him. It's like meeting a fellow pilgrim with more knowledge of the way.
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It's a slow kind of discovery -- because MacFarlane's writing demands attention and time; and also because i'm thinking through his take on things while i'm reading it, trying to see what his insights would mean for me as a Singaporean writing about place. But in that slowness is a pleasure -- the pleasure of taking time, of not rushing ahead of what is. i've started with his second book -- The Wild Places -- and i can't (but know i must) wait to start on the rest.
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PS:
It need not be said, of course, that the one thing all 4 writers have in common is their precise and passionate attention to the craft of writing -- the choice of each word, the shaping of each sentence. Absolutely gorgeous stuff.
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