Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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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. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Once you become a supporter, you’ll get a monthly newsletter with ideas for outdoor trips, inspiring stories, and exclusive discount codes from our partners, including exclusive 15% gear discount from Ellis Brigham. As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a "continual agitation alive" in the heart. The book which undoubtedly made the deepest impression on me was Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, dictated by Herzog from a hospital bed in 195I.

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. Drásticos maremotos, tsunamis, grandes terremotos, explosiones volcánicas, el paso de cometas: estos eran los fenómenos que habían sacudido la superficie terrestre y le habían dado su forma presente.For centuries [mountains] were regarded as useless obstructions – ‘considerable protuberances,’ as Dr. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things,’ he wrote after the Simplon crossing, ‘that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions … as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and imagination.

It had turned into a bright day, warm and windless, and the landscape was illuminated with the exact, egalitarian sunlight of high places. But Macfarlane, a mountain lover and climber, has a more visceral appreciation of mountains than Schama. The wind was fierce, drumming against the skin of my cheeks until it was numb, and pushing coldly through the gaps in my clothing. The effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great,' Ruskin could claim proudly of his favourite mountain in 1862, 'that even the gravest philosophers cannot resist it.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. Most of the world’s mountain ranges have been thrown up by the jostling and collision of the continental plates.

The sky was clear, and the tilted snowfields on the upper slopes of the mountains flashed the moonlight down into the valley like signalling mirrors. I was attracted by the bleakness of the places these men got to - the parsimony of the landscapes of mountain and pole, with their austere, Manichean colour scheme of black and white. Pushing for time and unroped, we half-jogged up over two steepening miles of glacier, trusting the lingering cold to keep the snow-bridges rigid.We moved quickly and efficiently during the descent, until we reached what looked like our final obstacle. 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. The new science of geology undermined assumptions about the age of the Earth, introducing into Western thought the idea of deep time.