Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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There were books everywhere in the house. My grandfather had not tried to organize them and so very different books found themselves neighbours. On a small shelf in the dining room Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing, The Hobbit and The Fireside. Omnibus of Detective Stories shared space with two leather-bound volumes of J. S. Mill's System of Logic. There were several books about Russia whose titles I did not properly understand, and dozens about exploration and mountaineering. If you want to read about a heap of travellers, mountaingazers and mountainclimbers, and explorers: read this book. The transformation of mountain landscapes in the European imagination was an astonishing reversal and that process has rarely been explored so effectively as Robert Macfarlane does in Mountains of the Mind. (...) Macfarlane argues that romanticism continues to dictate our responses to mountain landscapes." - Ed Douglas, The Observer Robert Macfarlane is passionate about mountain-climbing, and appropriately enough begins his book on the subject describing how in childhood he became "sold on adventure". 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.

Macfarlane writes with tremendous maturity, elegance and control. . . . A powerful debut, a remarkable blend of passion and scholarship.”– Evening Standard (UK) Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination is a book by British writer Robert Macfarlane published in 2003 about the history of the human fascination with mountains. The book takes its title from a line by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and combines history with first-person narrative. He considers why people are drawn to mountains despite their obvious dangers, and examines the powerful, and sometimes fatal hold that mountains can come to have over the imagination. The book's heroes include the mountaineer George Mallory, and its influences include the writing of Simon Schama and Francis Spufford. [1] In the end, Macfarlane criticizes Mallory for devoting more time to the mountain than his wife and notes that he has personally sworn off high-risk mountaineering. The New York Times's John Rothchild praised the book, writing "There's fascinating stuff here, and a clever premise, but Mountains of the Mind may cause recovering climbaholics to trace their addiction to their early homework assignments and file class-action lawsuits against their poetry teachers." [2] 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.

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. No es Cuvier el mayor poeta de nuestro siglo? —escribiría Balzac, entusiasmado, más adelante—. Nuestro inmortal naturalista ha reconstruido mundos partiendo de huesos blanqueados. Toma en las manos un fragmento de yeso y nos dice: “¡Mirad!”. Y, de pronto, la piedra se convierte en animales, lo muerto cobra vida y un mundo diferente se abre ante nuestros ojos.»” Aquella noche nevó y me quedé tumbado y en vela escuchando el rumor de los gruesos copos en el toldo de la tienda. Se acumulaban y formaban oscuros continentes de sombra en la tela, hasta que su peso se hacía excesivo para la pendiente del toldo y resbalaban hasta el suelo con un suave silbido.”

Bij de eerdere boeken die ik van zijn hand las, moest ik vaak naar adem happen en was er vaak een enorm gevoel van herkenning. 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. 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. Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist–as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.” I)lluminating and, occasionally, vertiginous (.....) This book glitters with memorable phrases." - Christopher Hirst, The IndependentIn this, his first book, Cambridge-educated Macfarlane examines the ways in which our response to mountains has been formed or mediated by a rich variety of cultural and intellectual influences. An enthusiastic mountain climber himself, Macfarlane interlards his knowledgeable and beautifully written study with thrilling accounts of his own experiences on the heights. — Merle Rubin The Los Angeles Times 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. 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.

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." 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. 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.Los catastrofistas creían que la historia de la Tierra estaba dominada por grandes revoluciones geofísicas: un Götterdämmerung, o más, que había convulsionado la Tierra en el pasado con agua, hielo y fuego destruyendo casi la vida. La Tierra era un cementerio, una necrópolis en la que se encontraban enterradas innumerables especies ya extintas. Drásticos maremotos, tsunamis, grandes terremotos, explosiones volcánicas, el paso de cometas: estos eran los fenómenos que habían sacudido la superficie terrestre y le habían dado su forma presente.”