It is, fundamentally, a book about the difference between “boundary” and “horizon”. As Barry Lopez says in an early chapter, “when a boundary in the known world . . . becomes instead a beckoning horizon, then a world one has never known becomes an integral part of one’s new universe. Memory and imagination come into play. The unknown future calls out to the present and to the remembered past, and in that moment of expansion, the imagined future seems attainable.” What adds tension and sometimes a whiff of raw fear to this utopian vision is Lopez’s conviction that our actual, species future might well already be foreclosed and facing extinction.
But that passage sums up much of what Horizon is about, and as such, it is inevitably a book about me, as it will also be about you, when you read it, as you really ought. I used to travel a great deal, and now I have stopped. I used to gather tiny objects, nothing of “heritage” or intrinsic value, and now they gather dust. The reason for that half-conscious decision to stop, which I think Lopez himself understands, is that one gets to the point where the only point of travel would be to do it continuously and to revisit every place obsessively, accumulating mental as well as physical itineraries to the point where “air miles” and “carbon footprint” are less of an issue than the simple psychic overload of having to process place into language.
