Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination

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I read Annapurna three times that summer. It was obvious to me that Herzog had chosen wisely in going for the top, despite the subsequent costs. For what, he and I were agreed, were toes and fingers compared to having stood on those few square yards of snow? If he had died it would still have been worth it. This was the lesson I took away from Herzog's book: that the finest end of all was to be had on a mountain-top - from death in valleys preserve me, 0 Lord. 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: 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. 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.

Why do people climb mountains despite the obvious danger to their life and limb? This book attempts to answer that question. I don’t read a lot of books like Mountains of the Mind. My bookshelves are lined with hefty volumes filled with high-stress historical events, of war and plague, oppression and political upheaval. In troubling times, I was drawn to this book’s low stakes, its thoughtful deliberations, and its gorgeous nature writing. Mountains are exceptionally hard to describe in words; even pictures often fail. But Macfarlane is exceptionally talented at describing indescribable sights. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? In their vastness and in their intricacy, mountains stretch out the individual mind and compress it simultaneously: they make it aware of its own immeasurable acreage and reach and, at the same time, of its own smallness" 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.

The first book I am going to talk about is Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane. Its full title is "Mountains of the Mind. A History of Fascination” and it is, in short, the book I was always going to write. 

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.

I was a twelve-year-old in my grandparents' house in the Scottish Highlands when I first came across one of the great stories of mountaineering: The Fight for Everest, an account of the 1924 British expedition during which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared near the summit of Everest. 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. That history of a changing mindset is what Robert Macfarlane covers, gorgeously and sweepingly, in this mind-bending, swoon-inducing grand philosophical musing on why mountain climbing came to be, and the currents of Western thought that paved the way to the rationalizations for climbing them. It's a book that, in its way, becomes an alternate history of the West -- spanning the arts, sciences, philosophy, and social norms -- and it reads like the loveliest literary fiction. As I was reading it, drinking in and embracing its constantly scintillating and paradigm-shifting ideas, I once stopped to note: "this is a brain teddy bear."This final verse could suggest a desire to be out of the limelight and away from the public speculation that comes hand in hand with fame. Isolation is often at the heart of many problems, but for those who live with a level of celebrity, it's something that becomes craved. 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. 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. Wonderfully illuminating. . . . An exhilarating blend of scholarship and adventure, displaying dazzling erudition, acute powers of analysis, a finely honed sense of cultural history and a passionate sense of the author’s engagement with his subject."— Los Angeles Times

The book which undoubtedly made the deepest impression on me was Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, dictated by Herzog from a hospital bed in 195I. He couldn't write it himself because he had no fingers left. Herzog was the leader of a team of French mountaineers which, in the spring of 1950, travelled to the Nepal Himalaya with the aim of being the first group to summit one of the world's fourteen 8,000-metre peaks. 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 basis for the new documentary film, Mountain: A Breathtaking Voyage into the Extreme. Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert McFarlane reveals how the mystery of the world’s highest places has came to grip the Western imagination—and perennially draws legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes. 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. 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.

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. 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. If you have ever wondered why people climb mountains, here is your answer. 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 Ninety Degrees North A new kind of exploration writing, perhaps even the birth of a new genre, which doesn’t just defy classification–it demands a whole new category of its own.”– The Telegraph (UK) 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".

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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. 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. The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen on to which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations."