Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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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. This was a hard book to read at the start. I'm a bedtime reader, and there were so many words I had to look up! Partly because of jargon and partly because I'm not as eloquent in English as I might have thought. 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

Macfarlane captures the physical hardship of mountaineering well, almost gleefully recounting historical and personal frostbite-episodes, and the suffering that many have endured in their battles against mountains. 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. 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.

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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.

Twelve years after I first read Annapurna - twelve years during which I had spent most of my holidays in the mountains - running my finger along the spines in a second-hand bookshop in Scotland, I came across another copy. That night I sat up late and read it through again, and again fell under its spell. Soon afterwards, I booked flights and a climbing partner - an Army friend of mine called Toby Till - for a week in the Alps. The idea of conquering mountains -- climbing to their peaks -- is, by and large, a relatively recent phenomenon. Book Genre: Adventure, Climbing, Environment, History, Mountaineering, Nature, Nonfiction, Outdoors, Philosophy, Sports, Travel 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. I)lluminating and, occasionally, vertiginous (.....) This book glitters with memorable phrases." - Christopher Hirst, The IndependentSo much of mountaineering today seems aggressively performative, meaning that it is perfectly in keeping with the 21st century social media-driven zeitgeist. Climbers keep finding new ways to be the “first” to do something. One of the symbols of conspicuous wealth is paying an outfitter to drag you to the top of Everest. Somewhat less ambitious influencers travel to the world’s other iconic wonders, where they proceed to take a selfie of themselves, sometimes dying in the process.

Macfarlane adds his bit to the long lore of mountaineering, but his encounters with the peaks themselves have special presence and acuity. (b&w illustrations) 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 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 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.McFarlane juxtaposes the cultural history with his own personal accounts. Some reviewers are of the opinion that the personal stories were unnecessary but I didn't mind his own input and I felt that it was a nice diversion from the more academic parts of the book. A crisp historical study of the sensations and emotions people have brought to (and taken from) mountains, laced with the author’s own experiences scrambling among the peaks. 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".

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." 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".

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 Pole 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.” Macfarlane writes with tremendous maturity, elegance and control. . . . A powerful debut, a remarkable blend of passion and scholarship.”– Evening Standard (UK) US hardcover subtitle: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit 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.