Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination

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I don’t read a lot of books like Mountains of the Mind. My bookshelves are lined with hefty volumes filled with high-stress historical events, of war and plague, oppression and political upheaval. In troubling times, I was drawn to this book’s low stakes, its thoughtful deliberations, and its gorgeous nature writing. Mountains are exceptionally hard to describe in words; even pictures often fail. But Macfarlane is exceptionally talented at describing indescribable sights. There was something unusual in the way I saw Lachenal and everything around us. I smiled to myself at the paltriness of our efforts. But all sense of exertion was gone, as though there were no longer any gravity. This diaphanous landscape, this quintessence of purity - these were not the mountains I knew; they were the mountains of my dreams. "

That was it - I was sold on adventure. In one of the reading binges which only the expanses of childhood time permit, I plundered my grandfather's library and by the end of that summer I had read a dozen or so of the most famous real-life exploration stories from the mountains and the poles, including Apsley Cherry-Garrard's tale of Antarctic endurance, The Worst Journey in the World, John Hunt's The Ascent of Everest and Edward Whymper's bloody account of his Scrambles Amongst the Alps. At once a fascinating work of history and a beautifully written mediation on how memory, imagination, and the landscape of mountains are joined together in our minds and under our feet.”– Forbes Moreover, mountains were dangerous places to be. It was believed that avalanches could be triggered by stimuli as light as a cough, the foot of a beetle, or the brush of a bird's wing as it swooped low across a loaded snow-slope. You might fall between the blue jaws of a crevasse, to be regurgitated years later by the glacier, pulped and rigid. Or you might encounter a god, demi-god or monster angry at having their territory trespassed upon - for mountains were conventionally the habitat of the supernatural and the hostile. In his famous Travels, John Mandeville described the tribe of Assassins who lived high among the peaks of the Elbruz range, presided over by the mysterious 'Old Man of the Mountains'. In Thomas More's Utopia the Zapoletes - a 'hideous, savage and fierce' race - are reputed to dwell 'in the high mountains'. True, mountains had in the past provided refuge for beleaguered peoples - it was to the mountains that Lot and his daughters fled when they were driven out of Zoar, for instance - but for the most part they were a form of landscape to be avoided. Go around mountains by all means, it was thought, along their flanks or between them if absolutely necessary - as many merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and missionaries had to - but certainly not up them.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. George Mallory’s body was discovered only in May 1999, seventy-five (75) years after his death and disappearance. His widow would have been long dead by that time and maybe even his children, but the book made no mention of this, just a description of Mallory’s body which had been preserved in ice: Stapleton suggests hitting the road to get as far away from his problems as possible; the white line indicating the markings of the highway. A new kind of exploration writing, perhaps even the birth of a new genre, which doesn’t just defy classification–it demands a whole new category of its own.”– The Telegraph (UK)

Macfarlane writes with tremendous maturity, elegance and control. . . . A powerful debut, a remarkable blend of passion and scholarship.”– Evening Standard (UK) Macfarlane tells this tale using a variety of techniques, melding cultural history, geological history, and his own experiences as a climber. The result is a beautifully written meditation that attempts to deconstruct the gravitational pull of mountains, while often succumbing to it.Uncluttered horizons liberate the mind like nothing else and it's no coincidence that the Left in this country should fall on access to the countryside, particularly our wild uplands, with such ardour. Furthermore, we have started to develop an interest in what those who live in the mountains - previously viewed as inarticulate dunderheads - have to say about them. No animal or plant could exist here. In the pure morning light this absence of all life, this utter destitution of nature, seemed only to intensify our own strength. How could we expect anyone else to understand the peculiar exhilaration that we drew from this barrenness, when man's natural tendency is to turn towards everything in nature that is rich and generous?'

Much of Macfarlane's terrain is well known and previously travelled, most recently in Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory. Macfarlane performs for mountains the service Francis Spufford did for the polar regions in his influential cultural history, I May be Some Time. But Macfarlane, a mountain lover and climber, has a more visceral appreciation of mountains than Schama. He is also a more engaging writer, his commentary, always crisp and relevant, leavened by personal experience beautifully related.The basis for the new documentary film, Mountain: A Breathtaking Voyage into the Extreme. Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert McFarlane reveals how the mystery of the world’s highest places has came to grip the Western imagination—and perennially draws legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes.

Wonderfully illuminating. . . . An exhilarating blend of scholarship and adventure, displaying dazzling erudition, acute powers of analysis, a finely honed sense of cultural history and a passionate sense of the author’s engagement with his subject."— Los Angeles Times This is not the only difference between us. In Mountains of the Mind Robert Macfarlane perfectly traces the history of man’s relationship with mountains, changing from one of hostility to one of awe, alongside his own experiences and emotions. He, like me, sympathises with the sometimes intoxicating feeling of insignificance one can feel in the wilderness - at the mercy of a power so much older and greater than our own. The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen on to which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations."Clearly Mallory himself didn’t know why he kept on doing what killed him in the end. Certainly there was a promise of fame and fortune. Had he succeeded, he would have come down from the mountain a hero and a celebrity, his name forever etched immortally in the history of mountain climbing. But this could not have been just the reason because even up to now, after countless successful climbs by all sorts of people (even kids, the blind, old people and the one-legged), people still continue to climb it and dying either on their way up or on their way down. And while Antarctica even now exists for most of us purely in the imagination, mountains are a more common currency. Simply put, more of us have more to say about them. Macfarlane argues that romanticism continues to dictate our responses to mountain landscapes. 'Those who travel to mountain tops,' he writes, 'are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.' But it's more complicated than that. Affordable transport has allowed people from all classes to experience the freedom mountains offer. Mcfarlane has written a book on the fascination with mountains and has provided us with a survey of the associative literature, history and personal accounts. He documents the changing attitudes of men to mountains. He tries to answer the question 'Why do people still go to mountains? He answers this by showing us images, emotions and metaphors. "The way you read landscapes and interpret them is a function of what you carry into them with you, and of cultural tradition. I think that happens in every sphere of life. But I think in mountains that disjunction between the imagined and the real becomes very visible. People die because they mistake the imagined for the real". And so begins Macfarlane’s mountain adventure. He writes about the forces that make mountains and the glaciers that populate them. There is lot on our perception of them too, the overcoming of the fear that these immense heights can bring, the fixation of getting to the summit of these peaks. These beautiful peaks can be deadly too, the Alps claim one climber a day during the season, and less people die on Scottish roads than they do in the mountains. But those that conquer the peaks are shown the magnificence and beauty of the world beneath their feet. Unlike me he writes so eloquently about the rise of the effects of Scientific Enquiry and Romanticism in breaking down the barriers of opinion and opening the mind's eye to the beauty of the unknown and the perilous. The penultimate chapter is about Everest - the World’s highest mountain - which, to many, became an object of all-consuming desire, to be conquered, to be subjugated. The death of George Mallory and many others since reminds us that any misplaced feeling of victory we may have in the mountains can only ever be temporary.