Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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Until the 19th century, few saw any reason to scale the serious Alpine (much less the Andean and Himalayan) peaks, but after a while that very ideal -- the practically pointless (and often very dangerous) ascent to -- ideally -- a mountain-top where no one had ever stood -- became a widespread ambition and popular sport. In the final analysis, however, it could very well be just instinct. There is that universal, unexplainable pleasure in being confronted with fear and danger provided you survive it. That is why some love to watch horror movies, do shoplifting, race cars or ride roller coasters. I read someone describe mountain-climbers as the “Conquistadores of the Useless.” And echo of this is found in the following quote in this book: 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." 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". 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".

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. There was something unusual in the way I saw Lachenal and everything around us. I smiled to myself at the paltriness of our efforts. But all sense of exertion was gone, as though there were no longer any gravity. This diaphanous landscape, this quintessence of purity - these were not the mountains I knew; they were the mountains of my dreams. " Three centuries ago, no one was interested in mountains and other wild places. The land could not be cultivated, nor was there any point in possessing them and the people who inhabited these heights were considered a lesser human. They were considered no go areas. But in the middle of the Eighteenth century, this perception of the mountain began to change. The premise of the sublime, the balance point of fear and exhilaration that could be achieved when climbing, coupled with the sense that the mountains were much, much older than previously thought, meant that the great thinkers of the age became interested in the how and why they were formed. But Macfarlane convincingly suggests that much of the spell of mountaineering is this very thing, carried over into adulthood, and that is what he means to convey in this book:

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. 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." The book culminates with a chapter on George Mallory's ill-fated attempts at the greatest peak of all, Everest.

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. Macfarlane, who continues his family's tradition of climbing, has assembled 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 ?"" - Stephen Lyons, San Francisco Chronicle No animal or plant could exist here. In the pure morning light this absence of all life, this utter destitution of nature, seemed only to intensify our own strength. How could we expect anyone else to understand the peculiar exhilaration that we drew from this barrenness, when man's natural tendency is to turn towards everything in nature that is rich and generous?'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.