This collection of 11 essays, many published but previously uncollected, takes us from the Yorkshire of the author's childhood to a British airstrip in Malaya, through the cosmopolitan art worlds of the title is given more time than the "Time", so to speak, with many of the essays concerned with boundaries, edges and horizons, both of the real universe and their objective correlatives in the mind.
This is a stimulating book of exploration, experience and philosophical meditation. The chapter `Ballistics' finds the author servicing bombers, admiring their beauty and power; and the strange timestopping moment when that power is unleashed. What is remarkable is that the resulting death - not of one of the hapless Malays at whom the plane's deadly loads were daily aimed, but of a British pilot accidentally killed by a rogue rocket - takes place while the author is admiring the perfect arc the weapon makes ". . . as if testimony to the perfection of its parabolic arc would be required of me".
There are sketchy references to a Yorkshire childhood under the guiding eye of a parent who taught him the art of seeing, and to `A Career in Art' pursued in 1960s London, the essay of that title plotting the arc of the trajectory that took him, in the 1970s, to Aran and the innovative intense mapping for which he is rightly celebrated.
Do not be misled by the title into expecting autobiography: while there are tantalising glimpses into the everyday life - brief references to a mother, father and very supportive home life, as well as his friendship with the artist Peter Joseph - these essays offer no more personal detail than "walks on the banks of a river of untold tales".
They provide fascinating insights into the play of a fine sensibility which, if quick to turn in disgust from native superstition and "unreason", is capable of rigorous and uncomfortable honesty. This is never more admirable than in his discussion of Pascal's luminous passage on the twin abysses between which man is suspended. While steadfastly refusing to be "driven into the arms of God" by the contemplation of such vast wonder, Robinson relies on what he believes to be the power of the mind, willing to accept its consolations, but so cold at times that I found myself pitting Rainer Maria Rilke against Robinson, looking for mercy among the former's treatment of similar philosophical territory in the Duino Elegies.
This is a book that sets up a dialogue with the reader, and even for those of us whose notion of maths ended with Theorem 29, it is worth staying with the essay entitled `Constellation and Questionmark', if only for the hilarious detective chase through the Internet that leads to encounters with, among others, the Maharishi University of Management. It ends with long diatribes from a mad mathematician and a duel, gleefully reported by Robinson, the object of which is to see who can slam the phone down first. And all to prove something called "the four-colour theorem", and answer the intriguing question "What shape is space?" The fun is in the chase, even for those who can only skirmish with some of the concepts of space and time explored in depth.
After a series of intellectual adventures with a brilliant mind revelling at times in its own power but never resorting to cleverness, I noted with relief as well as native annoyance that that even this gimlet-eyed observer is not always possessed of Einstein's idealised eye. `The Echosphere', which opens magnificently with a fanciful scene from one John Murray, an obscure 19th-century travel writer, puts forward the notion of the "echosphere", a sphere in which nature and humanity can co-exist in relative harmony. The author then rakes over the bones of old campaigns in Connemara and Aran, battles between locals and incoming environmentalists where gloves were removed on both sides.
This does little to serve the cause for which he fought so hard, since the debate is of necessity one-sided, with those in favour of an airport reduced at times to the level of caricature. I have a native disquiet about the terms of the Clifden airport debate in particular, and was intrigued that a man so sensitive to the imperial overtones of cartography delights in his re-naming of a vast tract of bogland, known locally by the names of the various townlands that comprise it, now re-drawn as a new entity, that of Roundstone Bog.
Such one-sidedness is rare. In `Firewalking', a walk with a philosopher into a landscape he sees as being of spiritual significance, but which Robinson resolutely does not, neither one convinces the other of his views, but both accord respect to the other's views in what amounts to a model of civilised debate.
As always with Robinson, the writing is exact and eloquent, the territory exciting. This is a book to cherish and re-read, challenging, infuriating and satisfying in turn, with nuggets of poetry glinting between the curves and planes of its ideas - and passages of pure gold.
Mary O'Malley is a poet and occasional essayist. Her fourth collection of poems, Asylum Road, has just been published by Salmon Press