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The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (The Grampian Quartet Book 4)

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Here in this book she writes of what she has experienced over the years walking, rambling, sleeping in the mountains. They are old mountains, eroded and no longer high. They reach up to a plateau, split and fissured. She draws them with all her senses—sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Reading, one becomes aware of what one has missed, what one has failed to pay attention to when walking. Have you considered the unique aroma of a sodden birch forest? A place can come to speak to us with more than just the five senses. She asks if perhaps there are other senses we fail to recognize. She goes on to show us that life is a constant search for knowledge and understanding, that often cannot be attained. It is the search itself that is important. The book goes beyond one of nature writing; it takes on a philosophical bent. A bewitching work of wisdom and light and, for the truth it expresses, the most important record you will listen to this year."

Step by step she also shows how for her the mountains have an inner, almost a soul, which also influences everything that lives on it or walks on it. Of course, she doesn't mean this religiously, but it comes very close to it. She explicitly refers to Taoism and Buddhism and the way in which interaction between human physicality (being in the body) and seemingly 'lifeless' matter is nevertheless possible. Amazing how subtle she does this, without falling into New Age-like or esoteric grumbling. It reminded me very much of Gregory Bateson and his intuition about everything being pervaded by 'mind'.a b c Ali Smith, "Shepherd, Anna (1893–1981)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, Retrieved 22 December 2013. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd describes making a similar discovery when she began walking in Scotland. She writes: “At first, mad to recover the tang of height, I made always for the summits and would not take time to explore the recesses.” A turning point came when a friend took Shepherd to Loch Coire an Lochain, a stretch of water that lies hidden in the hills. It was a September day, following a storm, and “the air was keen and buoyant, with a brilliancy as of ice”. For Shepherd there was a kind of magic in the act of walking itself and the way in which the human body adapts to the earth’s surface. "Eye and foot acquire in rough walking a coordination that makes one distinctly aware of where the next step will fall, even when watching land and sky." Countless walkers will have felt the same thing - but few will have put it into words so neatly. The inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power. Silence belongs to it. If jeeps find it out, or a funicular railway disfigures it, part of its meaning will be gone. The good of the greatest number is not here relevant. It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not on behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness.

This focus on The Living Mountain tends to obscure the creative achievement of Shepherd’s three novels, The Quarry Wood (1928), The Weatherhouse (1930) and A Pass in the Grampians (1933), with their attention to rural communities under pressure from modernity. And" is one of Shepherd's favourite words in The Living Mountain, being the conjunction that implies connection without hierarchy.

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For almost all her life, Shepherd lived in the house where she had been born. She travelled widely but always returned to the hills she loved. Macfarlane suggests that Shepherd’s focus on a particular place, one not far from her doorstep, led to a deepening rather than a restriction of knowledge. “ The Living Mountain needs to be understood as parochial in the best sense,” he has written.

Nan Shepherd 1893–1981" (PDF). Scottish Literary Tour Trust. 2003 . Retrieved 22 December 2013. {{ cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= ( help)

Exploring conflicting worlds

There are many things that go into my rating a non fiction on Goodreads. Skill with the written word is most definitely a necessity if a book wants 3 star or higher out of me, but to get into the 4 and 5 star range a book has to offer more than fine writing and nice structure. It must make me feel something. And to be a 5 star, I must be feeling something pretty special. By setting foot sideways to the growth of the heather, and pressing the sprays down, one can walk easily enough. Dried mud flats, sun-warmed, have a delicious touch, cushioned and smooth; so has long grass at morning, hot in the sun, but still cool and wet when the foot sinks into it, like food melting to a new flavour in the mouth. And a flower caught by the stalk between the toes is a small enchantment." Robert Macfarlane (30 August 2008). "I walk therefore I am". The Guardian . Retrieved 22 December 2013.

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