Quotes by Robert Moor

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

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 didnt. 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.

In walking, we acquire more of less.

“The source of modern malaise, he believed, was that civilized people were no longer equipped to survive in nature. They had forgotten how to raise food, how to build things, how to travel on foot. They were entirely dependent on the economy for their survival, which led them to be overworked and unhappy. People needed to get back to the land,”