I grew up as someone with very little cultural or historical identity - a white kid born in a settler colonial nation, with no real connection to my country or language of origin, decidedly unreligious and raised by parents with few strong political or social beliefs. All that nothingness can leave you pretty hollow, especially as I became an adult and realized that I had no true community or sense of connection to the world around me. It was Robert Macfarlane's Underland that first genuinely reached out and grounded me, validated the intense inexplicable emotion I've always felt when confronted with the scope and breadth of human history. Macfarlane was the first person besides myself to express the same kind of overwhelm I experience in those moments, and made me realize that the profound loneliness I've felt without a community around me is unfounded - I belong to a species that has lived and died and loved and fought and cooked and eaten and created for hundreds of thousands of years, and none of us are ever truly alone. I could honestly quote the entire book, but here's one from the very beginning that touched me so profoundly:

>I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that 'the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright.' The intimacy of that posture is moving to me - the dead and the living standing sole to sole. Seeing photographs of the early hand-marks left on the cave walls of Maltravieso, Lascaux or Sulawesi, I imagine laying my own palm precisely against the outline left by those unknown makers. I imagine, too, feeling a warm hand pressing through from within the cold rock, meeting mine fingertip to fingertip in open-handed encounter across time.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble and I hope you enjoy :)