Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination

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Over the course of three centuries, therefore, a tremendous revolution of perception occurred in the West concerning mountains. The qualities for which mountains were once reviled - steepness, desolation, perilousness - came to be numbered among their most prized aspects. PDF / EPUB File Name: Mountains_of_the_Mind_-_Robert_Macfarlane.pdf, Mountains_of_the_Mind_-_Robert_Macfarlane.epub

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. To me / High mountains are a feeling', declared Byron's Childe Harold, as he stared reflectively into the still waters of Lac Leman. Each of the following chapters tries to trace a genealogy for a different way of feeling about mountains, to show how that feeling was formed, inherited, reshaped and passed on until it became accepted by an individual or an age. The final chapter discusses how Mount Everest came to possess George Mallory, to cause him to leave his wife and family, and eventually to kill him. Mallory exemplifies the themes of the book, for in him all of these ways of feeling about mountains converged with unusual and lethal force. In this chapter, I have blended Mallory's letters and journals together with my own suppositions to write a speculative recreation of the three Everest expeditions of the 1920s in which Mallory took part. Geology, philosophy, writing, painting, natural history, chemistry, physics, you name it, and this book lets you in on how it developed and changed humanities awareness of the world we inhabit since roughly the 1600's. It's clear to Stapleton that there is a place absent of anxieties and struggles, but he's not yet reached it. He's understanding of the fact patience is required. 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.After the day's end Mallory lay, exhausted, in his cramped and sagging little tent, and wrote a letter home to Ruth by the granular light of a hurricane lamp. He knew that by the time his letter reached her in England a month later, his work on the mountain would probably have been completed for that year, one way or another. Much of the letter was taken up with an account of the day's efforts, but in his concluding paragraphs Mallory tried to describe to Ruth how he felt about being in such a place, attempting such a feat. 'Everest has the most steep ridges and appalling precipices that I have ever seen,' he wrote to her. 'My darling... I can't tell you how it possesses me.' If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The last two chapters of the book were the best. The chapter on Everest gave a straightforward account of George Mallory's obsession with climbing Everest that I found compelling, and the final chapter, which is also the shortest chapter, was most like what I expected the book to be about: a critical analysis of the human drive to climb to the top. 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.

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". Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed Into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit 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) 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.

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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. Nietzsche, a more famous metaphysician of fear than Ruskin, had this famous line: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” What he failed to say however, based on countless experience, are two more indisputable truisms: One, is that “What doesn’t kill you now, may kill you tomorrow if you repeat it”; and Two, “”What didn’t kill the others and made them stronger, could very well kill you during your first try.” Entkommenm, to escape, was my only focus. Life turned dark and dismal at a speed parallelled to the linedrive following traumatic brain injury. Self-expectations rooted in familiar physical strength, agitation and denial were anything but conducive to healing. Escape the hospital, escape reality. 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. When I read this passage, it made absolute sense to me, despite the intervening centuries. 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.

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 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. Of course the significant difference between de Saussure's chamois hunter and me was that for the hunter, risk wasn't optional - it came with the job. I sought risk out, however. I courted it. In fact, I paid for it. This is the great shift which has taken place in the history of risk. Risk has always been taken, but for a long time it was taken with some ulterior purpose in mind: scientific advancement, personal glory, financial gain. About two-and-a-half centuries ago, however, fear started to become fashionable for its own sake. Risk, it was realised, brought its own reward: the sense of physical exhilaration and elation which we would now attribute to the effects of adrenaline. And so risk-taking - the deliberate inducement of fear - became desirable: became a commodity. Macfarlane writes with tremendous maturity, elegance and control. . . . A powerful debut, a remarkable blend of passion and scholarship.”– Evening Standard (UK) Part history, part personal observation, this is a fascinating study of our (sometimes fatal) obsession with height. A brilliant book, beautifully written.”–Fergus Fleming, author of N inety Degrees North: The Quest for the North PoleOver the centuries, though, this has obviously changed. Writers and painters began to look on mountains as things of beauty. Geologists studied them in their efforts to describe the creation of earth itself. With the reputation of mountains growing, adventurers began to assault their slopes, risking all for an ephemeral thrill, which then had to be rationalized at length. I felt my feet freezing, but paid little attention. The highest mountain to be climbed by man lay under our feet! The names of our predecessors on these heights chased each other through my mind: Mummery, Mallory and Irvine, Bauer, WeIzenbach, Tilman, Shipton. How many of them were dead - how many had found on these mountains what, to them, was the finest end of all . . . I knew the end was near, but it was the end that all mountaineers wish for - an end in keeping with their ruling passion. I was consciously grateful to the mountains for being so beautiful for me that day, and as awed by their silence as if I had been in church. I was in no pain, and had no worry." 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.

Like Macfarlane, Maurice Herzog’s account of his ascent of Annapurnamade a deep impression on me. When I read accounts of the first successful Himalayan expeditions I had never even been climbing. I had of course been on family hikes in England and in the alps, but nothing that could be deemed mountaineering. Herzog’s Annapurna and Hunt’s Ascent of Everestcombined with a fertile imagination turned my relatively tame childhood day trips into fantasies of wilderness discovery. My mother’s picnics turned into dry biscuits whilst the breezes and warm summer sun became the merciless burning winds of the roof of the world. Equally interesting, in our understanding of the relationship between mind and mountains, is the view of them outside European thought, a region Macfarlane barely explores. While Romanticism was given a free hand with mountains in Europe to shape our responses to them, in China, India or Japan, mountains were not seen simply as being on the margins of human culture. Mountains of the Mind is at once an enthralling work of history, an intimate account of Macfarlane’s own experiences, and a beautifully written meditation on how memory, landscape, imagination, and the landscape of mountains are joined together in our minds and under our feet. 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.There are many books on climbing and climbers, and this is one of the best and most unusual I have read.”– The Times (UK) 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 In his account of the climb, Herzog describes becoming progressively more detached from what was happening to him. The clarity and thinness of the air, the crystalline beauty of the mountains and the strange painlessness of frostbite conspired to send him into a state of numbed serenity, which made him insensitive to his worsening injuries: Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge. One passage of the book excited me more than any other. It was the description by Noel Odell, the expedition's geologist, of his last sighting of Mallory and Irvine: