Adam Nicolson

Dispatches from the underworld

Robert Macfarlane exchanges mountains and high plateaus for caves, catacombs and subterranean streams to explore what lies at the heart of things

Edmund Burke, as a young Irish lawyer in 1756, first made the distinction between beauty and sublimity. Beauty for Burke was about continuity and connectedness. ‘Vegetables,’ he says, in one of the great pre-Romantic sentences, ‘are not sublime.’ Vegetables are beautiful because they are constant and continuous, and because beauty is the quality of perfect continuity: ‘The sense of being swiftly drawn in an easy coach on a smooth turf with gradual ascents and declivities is a better idea of the beautiful than anything.’

The sublime is the opposite, needing deep distances, withdrawals and chasms —the Abgrund, in the resonantly expressive German word for ‘an abyss’.  And where can you find the Abgrund, that hollow of otherness, on an average English day? Burke’s answer is in the gaps between the strokes of a single, slowly ringing bell, that chasm of a pause as you wait for the next stroke, each gap a hole opened in the texture of the world, a repeated view into silence, as if it occupied a floor below the one on which we stand.

The sublime, this potent otherness, depends on privations: ‘All general privations are great,’ Burke wrote: ‘Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude and Silence.’ These privations are not great in themselves, but are great because they withdraw, and, in the gaps they open, a sense of the unaddressably immense floods in around them. The sublime requires the world to diminish as you watch, and for that diminution to leave you not with something less  but something immeasurably more.

This is Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful dark subject in the most powerful book he has yet written: an exploration of the under-geography of the world, the places where in culture after culture, age after age, people have chosen to hide what is precious, to dig for what is valuable, to put away what might be harmful, including the dead.

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