A tale of interconnectedness and optimism
5 stars
There’s an old episode of Charlie Brown, a short series called This is America, Charlie Brown, in which our eponymous hero and the rest of the gang travel to the NASA space station in one of Linus’s dreams, where calamities ensue but the day is (unsurprisingly) saved by these plucky youths. Yet, one part has always remained in my thoughts since watching that show in the 1980s, and it’s a scene towards the end where Lucy, Peppermint Patty and Sally (Charlie’s sister) are looking out of the window. Sally asks, “do you notice something from up here, looking down there?… There are no boundary lines!… Wouldn’t it be nice to have maps with no boundaries?”
I hope you’ll forgive my paraphrasing there. I didn’t have a copy of the script to use and had to rely on an out-of-sync video online. Yet, this, for me, was central to reading Lifelines: …
There’s an old episode of Charlie Brown, a short series called This is America, Charlie Brown, in which our eponymous hero and the rest of the gang travel to the NASA space station in one of Linus’s dreams, where calamities ensue but the day is (unsurprisingly) saved by these plucky youths. Yet, one part has always remained in my thoughts since watching that show in the 1980s, and it’s a scene towards the end where Lucy, Peppermint Patty and Sally (Charlie’s sister) are looking out of the window. Sally asks, “do you notice something from up here, looking down there?… There are no boundary lines!… Wouldn’t it be nice to have maps with no boundaries?”
I hope you’ll forgive my paraphrasing there. I didn’t have a copy of the script to use and had to rely on an out-of-sync video online. Yet, this, for me, was central to reading Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece by Julian Hoffman, which, on initial reading, reads as a telling of Julian and his (now) wife, Julia, packing up life in the uk and starting a new home in Prespa, a region of two lakes in aremote part of Northern Greece, bordering on Albania and North Macedonia. However, as with all things, life is more multifaceted, and what began as a simple take for a better life becomes a tale of new friends, discovery, awakenings and realisations.
Lifelines can mean a myriad things, but in Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece, Julian Hoffman brings to life the interconnectedness of the world in which we live. The sense of the pervading national boundaries seems very ridiculous when considering that these are boundaries that humankind has made for themselves, for which nature and wildlife have no comprehension. My imagination did run away with me as my mind drifted back to Greece’s mythology and a more comic telling of the siege of Troy, though in my telling, it’s the tale of trying to cross a land border dressed as a pantomime horse, yet I digress.
I’m often impressed (and jealous) of some of Julian’s photos, which traverse across my social media, and the land itself tells the tales that have worn through its mountainous landscape. With such tranquillity, it’s hard to believe that a civil war ensued here, yet its scars are another aspect of the interconnectedness of Lifelines, and remains as much alive in some of the residents as it did in those times, and it is here that Lifelines becomes so much more than one journey to a new life and the natural world’s resilience to human intrusion, but a new chapter to a story in a new home.
I felt there was an underlying nuance within Lifelines, in that not only are we interconnected with, not just the natural world, but with our own created world also. The communities we build are not just houses we build and live in, they are a part of the lifeblood of our world, where tales are created and passed down to our children and so on to theirs. This, for me, was another ‘lifeline’ where, if humankind is not careful, then it risks losing touch not just with the natural world, but with the very thing that makes us ‘human’.