Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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I thought of the resistless passion which drives men to undertake terrific scrambles. No example can deter them . . . a peak can exercise the same irresistible power of attraction as an abyss." Time does not stop or slow down when you are in danger. Everything happens as fast. It is just that - providing we survive them - we subject these periods of time to such intense retrospective scrutiny that we come to know them more fully, more exactly. We see them in freeze-frame.” A rough memorial cairn is built for the dead Sherpas at Camp III. Bruce is sanguine about the accident. Nobody's fault, he says. Nor do the families of the dead men seem interested in blaming anyone. Their men died when they were meant to die. But Mallory won't be consoled. He considers their death his doing. "It was not a desperate game, I thought," he writes to Ruth, "with the plans we made. Perhaps with the habit of dealing with certain kinds of danger one becomes accustomed to measuring some that are best left unmeasured and untried…the three of us were deceived; there wasn't an inkling of danger among us." He is aware, too, of how close he came to dying. "It was a wonderful escape for me & we may indeed be thankful for that together. Dear love when I think what your grief would have been I humbly thank God. I am alive…". 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. "

Ik zal het zeggen zoals het is: ik ben een fan van Robert Macfarlane en ik hou ervan om te lezen hoe hij oude of wilde plaatsen zelf verkent en hoe hij dat ervaart. Ik hou van zijn stijl en van zijn gedachtengang, ik hou ervan hoe hij eerlijk is, hoe hij een boek opbouwt tot een soort climax, ik hou van zijn openheid tot een extra dimensie en ik hou van zijn spiritualiteit. Macfarlane, a mountain lover and climber, has a visceral appreciation of mountains. . . . He is an engaging writer, his commentary, always crisp and relevant, leavened by personal experience beautifully related.”– The Observer (UK) Below Toby, the slope narrowed down to a chute which funnelled out over the precipices on the south face of the ridge. If I slipped, or the snow gave way, I'd slide past Toby, pull him off, and we'd free-fall hundreds of feet down to the glacier. 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. 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.In my experience, mountaineering books tend to break down into two broad categories. The first are climbing memoirs, written by the men and women who’ve summitted the world’s highest and most dangerous peaks. Though often larded with a bit of entry-level philosophizing to explain their altitudinal-defying urges, these volumes typically focus on overcoming the technical challenges. They are – in the end – about conquering the mountain, bagging the summit, mastering the natural world. In other words, these memoirs are fueled by an underlying strain of alpha toxicity. The second group consists of mountaineering disasters, when the aforementioned need to stand atop the highest local geographical point ends in pointless suffering and death. As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a "continual agitation alive" in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear - this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.” A convincing book of historical evidence alongside his own oxygen-deprived experiences in an attempt to answer the age old question, 'Why climb the mountain?' "— San Francisco Chronicle 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. 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

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 An early significant step towards this is Thomas Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), which, he believes, helped make us "able to imagine a past -- a deep history -- for landscapes". Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth It is these very dangers, this alternation of hope and fear, the continual agitation kept alive by these sensations in his heart, which excite the huntsman, just as they animate the gambler, the warrior, the sailor and, even to a certain point, the naturalist among the Alps whose life resembles closely, in some respects, that of the chamois hunter."The accounts of exploration are interesting but this book is chiefly centered on cultural fascination rather than tales of daring do. This is a history of mountains not mountaineering which is an important distinction. In a nutshell why people came to the mountain and how they dreamed and desired it is McFarlane's chief concern. This is a geneology for how people thought about mountains not a list of statistics and dates. 'Mountains of the Mind' is a challenge to hubris. It speaks to our complacency that the world is made by and for humans. Macfarlane notes that: "what makes mountain-going peculiar among leisure activities is that it demands of some of its participants that they die" -- but then that's also part of its fascination and appeal.