spending twenty-four hours in a single spot by a river in the Scottish Highlands in pursuit of them. And so I lay back in the grass and looked up at the clouds, having released myself from the obligation to have any particular thoughts about the clouds, or anything else. For a long time, I gazed up at them as they drifted eastward—or possibly westward—above the valley, watching their slow and ceaseless changes of formation, their gatherings and partings, and realizing what a strange spectacle they were, these great shifting fortresses of vapor in the sky, and how rarely I ever focused any serious attention on them, or looked at them for any other reason than judging the likelihood of rain. I watched the shadows cast on the mountain by the migrating clouds, the slow and stately progression of darkness across the landscape, and thought about how everything in the world was moving all the time, how nothing was ever still for even a moment. Each individual blade of grass was trembling minutely in response to some outward force or inner energy. To look closely enough at anything, I thought, was to witness its own particular flux, the pattern of its perpetual mutability.
Slowly but perceptibly, the light receded and the darknesses massed, and I heard the strange machine-like burbling of a bird Dopplering to and fro in the air above me. The air began to chill, and I crawled into my tent and rummaged in my bag for my fleece, and when I emerged again I noted the motionless presence of a stag on the shoulder of the mountain. I looked at him a long time, until it was almost completely dark, and he seemed to be standing not just perfectly still but attentively, too, as though he was waiting for some signal to proceed to his next location. He was much too far away to tell whether he was looking at me, though I assumed that he was, on the perhaps somewhat arrogant assumption that I must have presented the most interesting spectacle in his panoramic vista from the top of the mountain. I wondered what opinion of me he might have formed up there on his crag, before realizing that deer probably did not have opinions about things, and that they were much the better for it.
Something had happened here, I thought, or was in the process of happening. I felt differently about this place. Perhaps the thing that was happening was that I had gone slightly mad from boredom. But I was nevertheless aware of a new feeling, a sensation of tenderness toward the place. And what was more, and stranger, was that I felt that this tenderness was somehow reciprocated. It was just as Andres had said, I realized: something about the experience of being alone here, with nothing to do but be, and sit, and watch, and listen, had caused me to feel as though I were in some kind of relationship with the place. I felt seen by the mountain, known and accepted by the landscape. But even the word landscape felt wrong to me. It was a visual term, after all, reflecting the way in which we imposed our aesthetic categories on nature, reducing it to a view, a scene. And it occurred to me that I had never really encountered nature as anything other than a landscape—even, and in fact especially, when I was most struck by its beauty, its weirdness, its otherness. Nature was something I stopped the car to get out and have a look at, before getting back in the car and continuing on. It was something that I consumed, experienced, like a cultural product. But this was not what was going on here. What was happening was not entirely, or even primarily, an aesthetic experience on my part. I was not simply appreciating the view, in other words; nor had I been doing so for hours at this point. I was not having a solitary moment and taking in the air, the landscape. In fact I was—in some strange sense that should by rights have seemed creepy—not even properly alone.
In the dwindling light the mountain had come to appear much closer than it was, and for a moment it seemed to me a living thing—not a mound of cold and insensate rock, but an immense animal that had laid its vast bulk across the land and was peacefully asleep, so that I could almost imagine reaching out