Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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It snowed that night, and l lay awake listening to the heavy flakes falling on to the flysheet of our tent. They clumped together to make dark continents of shadow on the fabric, until the drifts became too heavy for the slope of the tent and slid with a soft hiss down to the ground. In the small hours the snow stopped, but when we unzipped the tent door at 6 a.m. there was an ominous yellowish storm light drizzling through the clouds. We set off apprehensively towards the ridge. An imaginative, original essay in cultural history–a book that evokes as well as investigates the fear and wonder of high places.”–William Fiennes, author of The Snow Geese 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: The childish imagination has more trust in the transparency of a story than the adult imagination: a readier faith that things happened the way they are said to have done. It is more powerful in its capacity for sympathy, too, and as I read those books I lived intensely with and through the explorers. I spent evenings with them in their tents, thawing pemmican hoosh over a seal-blubber stove as the wind skirled outside. I sledge-hauled through thigh-deep polar snow. I bumped over sastrugi, tumbled down gullies, clambered up arêtes and strode along ridges. From the summits of mountains I surveyed the world as though it were a map. Ten times or more I nearly died. This is the human paradox of altitude: that it both exalts the individual mind and erases it. Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.”

It wasn't, either. It beat a path of sound over the glacier and thumped its way off east, towards the pinnacle of the Zinalrothorn, where somebody else had died. Oil painting is an appropriate medium to represent the processes of geology, for oil paints have landscapes immanent within them: they are made of minerals. About mountains, sure, but even more so about people. How their perception of the world changed in the last centuries and how the influence of the mountains shaped everything. Everything? Yes. Everything.Early mountaineers were lost for words to describe the splendor of the mountains, but Robert Macfarlane is not; in particular, he has a gift for arresting similes.”– The Times Literary Supplement I read Annapurna three times that summer. It was obvious to me that Herzog had chosen wisely in going for the top, despite the subsequent costs. For what, he and I were agreed, were toes and fingers compared to having stood on those few square yards of snow? If he had died it would still have been worth it. This was the lesson I took away from Herzog's book: that the finest end of all was to be had on a mountain-top - from death in valleys preserve me, 0 Lord. The other foundation for this intellectual elevation was Western empiricism. The new science of geology undermined assumptions about the age of the Earth, introducing into Western thought the idea of deep time. Mountains were no longer a barren, unchanging nothing but places worthy of scientific inquiry. For that reason it doesn't deal in names, dates, peaks and heights, like the standard histories of the mountains, but instead in sensations, emotions and ideas.

Nel mondo montano le cose si comportano in modo strano e inusitato. Anche il tempo si torce e si deforma. Di fronte a scale temporali cadenzate in ere geologiche, perdiamo la percezione del tempo che ci è consueta. L'interesse e la coscienza del mondo di fuori scompaiono di fronte a una gerarchia di bisogni molto più immediati e vitali: calore, cibo, direzione, riparo, sopravvivenza. E se qualcosa va storto, anche il tempo si spezza, per riconfigurarsi attorno a quel momento specifico, a quell'incidente particolare. Tutto porta lì e da lì si dipana. È come se, per quanto riguarda la dimensione temporale, acquistassimo un nuovo centro dell'esistenza.” A hauntingly beautiful diptych of works inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s travels with celebrated collaborators to two eerie corners of England. Then came a shout. "Cailloux! Cailloux!" I heard yelled from above, in a female voice. The words echoed down towards us. I looked up to see where they had come from. Liberated from fear, he achieves a serene, practical awareness and what has seemed like a dead end now becomes a way forward. Most of us regard risking our lives in this way as foolish, but such profound experiences are compelling, even addictive.

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An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death. 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. During the day the sky is flawless, like a cupola of glass, but each evening the greens and blues and yellows of a Middle Eastern sunset congregate in the air, and kaleidoscope together on the passing water. Flying fish scoot out of the sea, executing their stiff skimming little leaps and occasionally thunking into the ship's side. And dolphins chaperone the ship, leaping in and out of the water to port and starboard. I didn't have any spare gloves. But there wasn't time to worry about it anyway, because the rotten snow which had just about tolerated our weight during the ascent would already be melting in the morning sun. We needed to get down as fast as possible.

There is something august and stately in the Air of these things,’ he wrote after the Simplon crossing, ‘that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions … as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and imagination.” Until the 19th century, few saw any reason to scale the serious Alpine (much less the Andean and Himalayan) peaks, but after a while that very ideal -- the practically pointless (and often very dangerous) ascent to -- ideally -- a mountain-top where no one had ever stood -- became a widespread ambition and popular sport.

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. If you have ever wondered why people climb mountains, then here is your answer. Part history, part personal observation, this is a fascinating study of our (sometimes fatal) obsession with height. A brilliant book, beautifully written." When Hannibal crossed the Alps in ancient times, it was for the practical purpose of crossing a barrier with solid objectives in mind: surprise and conquest. Sea voyagers did what they did to find gold or to fill in the maps with seized colonial holdings for royalty. Nature, or nature for its own sake, was never a goal, it was an obstacle; something to be feared, surmounted, but not surmounted strictly to surmount it. It was an inconvenience, a challenge in the way of an end game. It wasn’t the first time I had read Hopkins’ immortal line. And my first reaction to it, and its embedding in the poem in which it features made me question MacFarlane’s deployment of it as an epigraph to his book, and indeed, in its title.