Endnotes #12: This forest is alive and singing
Robert Macfarlane's Is A River Alive? • Substack Book Group Directory
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Endnotes | Issue #12: This forest is alive and singing
Greetings!
This is Endnotes, a monthly newsletter from Footnotes and Tangents. You can choose which emails you would like to receive in your subscription settings.
Today, a personal response to Robert Macfarlane’s new book, Is A River Alive?, an update from our slow reads, and a list of next month’s book groups hosted by readers and writers on Substack. Enjoy.
This forest is alive and singing
In books, we so often see ourselves, fragmented and refracted in a story some other human tells. Memories stir. We recognise life, and life takes on more meaning to renew itself in words.
Then, just occasionally, you read a book where the author has set down your memory precisely as it was. There are no metaphors to mediate what you see, as the past lifts perfectly from the page.
It had been a strange evening. May 2025, warm and bright. I put the kids to bed, did odd jobs around the house and in the garden. While in my ears, I listened to Robert Macfarlane reading his new book, Is A River Alive?:
With every step we take up towards the Cedar Forest on that trail, the sense of the forest’s activity thickens, steams, multiplies, teems. The forest’s noise fizzes around us: hoots, buzzes, clicks, rasps, calls.
And there I am, back in Los Cedros, Ecuador, 2007. I spent two months up in this cloud forest, just north of the equator, in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth.
I was in my early twenties, a little unmoored, adrift and disgruntled with myself and with the world. I had never been this far from anything, many hours by mule up a mountain deep into the mist and the mud. And yet here I felt close to something significant. Something alive.
It was here that I took my first copy of War and Peace. In a hammock in the clouds, listening to frogs hidden in the fog, I fell in love with Pierre Bezukhov. Tolstoy beneath the trees, I walked with Natasha by the river, great morpho butterflies dancing about our heads.
It was here I stood on the snake, while planting saplings in a pasture; its tooth leaving a little scar that twitched every time I swam. It was here, one day, I saw a puma watching me. A second, and it was gone.
Some months after I left, Ecuador proclaimed a radical new constitution that granted rights to nature. When mining corporations came to kill Los Cedros, activists and the courts intervened. The forest had a right to exist.
Robert Macfarlane’s book Is A River Alive? begins in Los Cedros in the wake of that ruling. He walks up the same path I walked almost twenty years ago. He meets Josef DeCoux, the larger-than-life American who for forty years was the shipwrecked guardian of that cloud forest.
He died last year, aged 73. When Rob visited, he handed him a copy of Gilgamesh for his forest library. DeCoux said, “Books don’t last long up here.” In the damp, living air.
In 2007, I left behind my copy of War and Peace. I wonder who read it after me? I took with me a piece of wood; a broken walking stick. Here it is on my desk, a memory of two months that turned my life.
Robert Macfarlane came to the cloud forest in search of the source of the Río Los Cedros, where water, air, land and life become almost indistinguishable and one. He was joined on his expedition by mycologist Giuliana Furci, legal activist César Rodríguez-Garavito, and the musician Cosmo Sheldrake.
As they climbed, they composed a song together and in collaboration with Los Cedros. Macfarlane writes:
We call it ‘Song of the Cedars’ because we know we couldn’t have written that song anywhere other than in that place, at that time. The river and the forest have made it possible. It is clear to us that Los Cedros has been our active collaborator, the song’s co-creator.
Macfarlane and his fellow humans want to get the Los Cedros ecosystem legally recognised as the moral author of this song. The Ecuador copyright office remains unconvinced, but it is not such a far-fetched idea in a country whose constitution has expanded the concept of personhood to encompass nature itself.
One day in May, I listened to the song written by a forest I once knew. In the gold edge of evening, the room fell dark as, green on green, the understory grew back. In the air at my skin, something slunk. The memory of a thing.
Trees speak in your leaves please
And streams tell me your dreamsBirds sing me your rhymes please
And stones teach me your timesEarth cover my limbs now
And mould thrive on my skinClouds deepen my sight please
And storms lend me your light
In the book beside me, I'd re-met the man who saved my life. Martín Obando, the forest guide who, that day, all but carried me down the mountain. Macfarlane writes, “he is made of steel and stone. His muscles have muscles on them.” I recall his gentle smile, giant strength, his hand guiding my eye to fungi, orchids, bromeliad.
Macfarlane writes:
All around us, we can see the forest extending in ridges and valleys. Mist hangs in scarves. The forest froths with sound: cicadas, birds, frogs, all singing and calling and signalling in a vast semiotic broth.
The forest is alive and singing in my room.
I tell it miracles. Forest, it’s been so long. I have children now! Forest, they are the strangest things. I’m writing a book. I think you’re in it, forest. I think you’re in everything I do now. Forest? I read a book, I heard a song, and memory took root in story to make life make sense once more.
Forest, you are alive. You are still alive. And thank you, forest, for everything. And thank you for your song.
Find out more about the Los Cedros Reserve on their website and in the documentary linked above.
Read more about Robert Macfarlane’s new book, Is A River Alive?
Slow read update
At Footnotes & Tangents, there are currently three slow reads underway:
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: Main page | Most recent post
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel: Main page | Most recent post
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel: Main page | Most recent post
Two books on the horizon:
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (September): Main page
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (November): Main page
All past slow reads are compiled in the book guides section of the website.
The lineup for 2026 will be announced at the end of September!
June Book Groups
As usual, in our library of further reading resources, you can find the Substack Book Group Directory. I update this list monthly. If you run a book group or book club on Substack, get in touch so I can add yours to the list.
And here is a list of some of the books people will be reading in June:
- : Marsha by Tourmaline
The Austen Connection Read-Along with
: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (May-Jun)The Big Read with
: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather / A Supposedly Fun Thing by David Foster WallaceThe Book Club for Busy Readers with
: On the Move: A Life by Oliver SacksThe Burning Archive Slow Read with
: The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (Feb - Sep)Cambridge Ladies' Dining Society: The 20th Century Book Club with
: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers (Jun-Jul)Cams Campbell Reads with
: Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov- : Chasing Fog by Laura Pashby (all 2025)
Close Reads HQ with
, , : The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (Feb-Jun) / The Great Gatsby by F. Scott FitzgeraldClosely Reading with
: Middlemarch by George Eliot- : Plato’s Republic / The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Creative, Inspired, Happy: Read Like a Writer Book Club with
: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van PeltThe Creative Kingdom Book Club with
: Seeking Wisdom by Julia Cameron (Mar-TBD)- : Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (all 2025) / Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu / Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin / Maurice by E.M. Forster / Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Deep Reads Book Club with
: Homer’s The Iliad (Jan - June)Dostoevsky book club «Theta-Delta» with
: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (all 2025)The Eclectic Reader with
: Summer by Edith WhartonElizabeth Goudge Bookclub with
: The Joy of the Snow by Elizabeth GoudgeEmily’s Walking Book Club with
: Loitering with Intent by Muriel SparkThe First Books Book Club with
: Along Came a Spider by James Patterson4,000 Ideas: The Oliver Burkeman Bookclub with
: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (Feb-TBD)FrizzLit with
: A Farewell to Arms and Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway (May-Jun)Genius & Ink with
: Dante’s The Divine Comedy (all 2025)Guerilla Readers with
: Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post by Martin BaronInterpreting the Great Artificer: Close readings of the works of James Joyce with
: Dubliners by James JoyceThe Kindred Spirits Bookclub with
: Anne’s House of Dreams by Lucy Maud MontgomeryLove of Literature with
: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (Jun-Aug)- : Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (continued)
More Magic Book Blub with
: Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab- : Wanderland: A Search for Magic in the Landscape by Jini Reddy
- : Chaucer Reading Challenge (continued)
Pomus Aureus with
: Arturo’s Island by Elsa MoranteRead the Classics with
: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (all 2025) / The Counterfeiters by André Gide (May-Jun) / The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens (Apr-Feb) / Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf- & : War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (all 2025) / Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (May-Jun)
Reading Revisited with
& : Trust by Hernan DiazReceipt from the Bookshop with
: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino- : Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
The Sixty-Minute Book Club with
: Recitatif by Toni MorrisonTo All My Darlings with
: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young (all 2025)Well-Read Weekend with
: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (May-Jun)
Thank you!
And that’s all from me. Many thanks for subscribing to Footnotes and Tangents and joining our slow reads. And I’ll be back next month with more Endnotes.
Simon
Thank you for your wonderful review of Robert Macfarlane’s new book - it’s rare a review sends me straight to hit ‘order’ (especially when it’s still in hardback and not cheap!) but I love his writing and this is a fascinating subject, about the rights and ‘life’ of nature. I went off down a rabbit hole to find out more about Los Cedros, and recommended your piece to my son who is about to start his philosophy masters’ dissertation on personhood. (He’s a musician too, so it’s a double-whammy!) 😊
The River is Alive sounds like an enchanting read and I love your forest anecdotes!