## Metadata - Author: [[Robert Macfarlane]] - Full Title: Underland - Category: #books ## Highlights - When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth. ([Location 174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JRCS6J5&location=174)) - I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that ‘the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright’. The intimacy of that posture is moving to me – the dead and the living standing sole to sole. ([Location 208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JRCS6J5&location=208)) - ‘To be human means above all to bury,’ declares Robert Pogue Harrison in his study of burial practices, The Dominion of the Dead, boldly drawing on Vico’s suggestion that humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, meaning ‘burying, burial’, itself from humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘soil’. ([Location 305](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JRCS6J5&location=305)) - In burial, the human body becomes a component of the earth, returned as dust to dust – inhumed, restored to humility, rendered humble. ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JRCS6J5&location=311)) - We are part mineral beings too – our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones – and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land. It is mineralization – the ability to convert calcium into bone – that allows us to walk upright, to be vertebrate, to fashion the skulls that shield our brains. ([Location 396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07JRCS6J5&location=396))