Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

Product Information

PDF / EPUB File Name: Mountains_of_the_Mind_-_Robert_Macfarlane.pdf, Mountains_of_the_Mind_-_Robert_Macfarlane.epub

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. 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. 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.” 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. 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.”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.

This is the human paradox of altitude: that it both exalts the individual mind and erases it. Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.” But what is Hopkins’ line doing, serving as an epigraph to such a book? Hopkins’ poem is about melancholia; indeed, it might be one of the most powerful and moving explorations of the mind’s travails. Here is how I read his line: our mind is capable of entertaining thoughts and feelings which contain within them chasms of despair, points at which we stare into a dark abyss, an unfathomable one, with invisible depths. These are our own private hells, glimpses of which we catch when we walk up to the edge and look. The effect on the reader–especially one who has been to the mountains–is dramatic; you are reminded of the frightening heights from which you can gaze down on seemingly endless icy and windswept slopes, the lower reaches of which are shrouded with their own mysterious darkness; and you are reminded too, of the darkest thoughts you have entertained in your most melancholic moments. Gradually, the team moved up the mountain, establishing successively higher camps. The altitude, the extreme cold and the load-bearing began to take their toll. But as Herzog grew physically weaker, so his conviction strengthened that the summit was attainable. Eventually, on 3 June, he and a climber called Louis Lachenal left Camp V, the highest camp, in a bid for the top of Annapurna. 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. We were staying in the house for the summer. My brother and I were allowed to go anywhere except into the room at the end of the hallway, which was my grandfather's study. We played hide and seek, and I often hid in the big wardrobe in our bedroom. It smelt strongly of camphor, and there was a clutter of shoes on the floor of the wardrobe which made it difficult to stand up in. My grandmother's fur coat hung in it, too, sheathed in thin clear plastic to keep the moths away. It was strange to put a hand out to touch the soft fur and feel the smooth plastic instead.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." At once a fascinating work of history and a beautifully written mediation on how memory, imagination, and the landscape of mountains are joined together in our minds and under our feet.”– Forbes

Mountains of the Mind is a tumult of delights all the way. I found it particularly rewarding on early puzzling about the origin of mountains." - Roy Herbert, New Scientist If you want to read about a heap of travellers, mountaingazers and mountainclimbers, and explorers: read this book. The other foundation for this intellectual elevation was Western empiricism. The new science of geology undermined assumptions about the age of the Earth, introducing into Western thought the idea of deep time. Mountains were no longer a barren, unchanging nothing but places worthy of scientific inquiry. 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.So 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 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. US hardcover subtitle: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit