This memoir about living off the grid and tech-free in County Galway will inspire, connect and slow down the most impatient of readers, and that is a very good thing.
Mark Boyle was The Moneyless Man in his memoir of that title, about the first of three years he spent living without money. The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology covers another first year: Boyle has now made the shift to a life without modern technology in County Galway, Ireland. What is modern technology? Obviously, definitions are complicated, but for Boyle his new way of living means hauling his own water; fishing, foraging and gardening for his food; making his own beer and wine; and traveling by bicycle, by hitchhiking and on foot. (He beats himself up about monofilament fishing line but, within the book’s timeline, has not yet found an alternative.)
Organized as the diary of a year in its four seasons, The Way Home is a thoughtful study, often wise but always questioning and seeking. With frequent references to Edward Abbey, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Robert Macfarlane, Wendell Berry, Henry David Thoreau and others, Boyle places himself in a grand tradition of intellectual naturalists and thinkers. He also makes repeated forays (both literally and in imagination and research) to Great Blasket Island, an unusually literary place where a technology-free lifestyle only recently ended. He aims to query every decision, investigate its outcomes: while writing this book using a pencil, he stops to consider the making of that tool–its wood and graphite and paint, the extraction of these materials and the transportation of the workers who made it. Boyle, stymied by the ecological impact of such a simple technology as a pencil, is a former vegan who now eats fish and venison. He is a man willing to rethink his outlook.
Boyle has a sense of humor as well as a deep sensitivity to the needs of people as well as the planet and its ecosystems. “Rome,” he reflects, “wasn’t demolished in a day,” as he gardens with the (plastic) tools available and plans for the future. His writing style is pensive and unhurried. His lifestyle is in many ways “slow,” as in slow food and slow transportation, and he observes that writing by hand after a longtime addiction to computers has slowed his thought processes, for the better. “Just as carpenters always recommend measuring twice and cutting once, I’ve begun thinking twice and writing once.”
The result is a deeply appealing examination of nearly all aspects of modern human life, by a thorough, careful, concerned narrator. Readers already considering various forms of disconnection from modern technologies–in favor of a reconnection with local plants, animals, soil and people–will be goaded and inspired. Those less attracted to composting their own feces will nonetheless be entranced by Boyle’s unusual lifestyle, and perhaps moved a little closer to the earth.
This review originally ran in the March 5, 2019 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.
Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: nature, nonfiction, Shelf Awareness |
pagesofjulia 
Thank you… here’s to the eccentrics, misfits & hermits amongst us, those listed and all the rest; we need them, then and now.
Well said.
More insight on Boyle: I found this interview, conducted by a close friend, to be illuminating & worthwhile:
https://dark-mountain.net/life-without-machines/
(a close friend of Boyle’s, to be clear.)
I am very intrigued by the idea of hypocrisy as a goal.
I, also, noted the hypocrisy bit; but it’s really just a reframing of the familiar concept of ‘creative tension’ motivated by ‘stretch goals’. Helpful reminder, nevertheless!
But the reframing using a term we so clearly understand as negative; that really opens it up in a new way for me. Words matter.
“…he observes that writing by hand after a longtime addiction to computers has slowed his thought processes, for the better. ‘Just as carpenters always recommend measuring twice and cutting once, I’ve begun thinking twice and writing once.'”
I think this is very true.
I’ve been noticing that my last two stories, the first I wrote without printing then out (repeatedly) for edits, were too rushed. Not written too quickly, but written without enough air to breathe, too quick to get to the “point.”
At first I thought it was because of a sudden awareness of mortality on my part (following major surgery), but now I think it’s because of too many screens and not enough paper and pen.
So, my printer problems now solved, I’ve gone back to printing out drafts and carrying them around with me, reviewing and thinking and considering.
I’m definitely not a “think twice and write once” person, though. That requires a good memory (I’ve already had four ideas for my next story, three of which I’ve forgotten). With me it’s more “draft in haste, rewrite at leisure.”
Thanks for weighing in, Anthony. Always nice to hear from you.
I repeatedly get the advice to write by hand for reasons Boyle gives, that it gives the brain time to sort of edit as the words come out. And when I take the advice, I do find it working that way for me. And yet I’m resistant; so often sit at the computer anyway. Printing out is always a good tactic, though. I do a lot of literal cutting and pasting on printed copies.
Do you carry a little notebook around for those ideas you have and forget? Or, the tech way, put in a voice memo on the smartphone… you don’t want to lose those!!
Tom Parks, at the New Yorker, wrote about this and related questions recently, too. I thought he made some good points:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/do-we-write-differently-on-a-screen
Good points, for sure. No question there’s something to be gained by turning off the wifi!
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