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e_freckles's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Abandonment
Minor: Colonisation and Alcohol
katyab's review against another edition
4.0
I think I fell in love with Robert Macfarlane's writing because, in my opinion, nobody else so adeptly describes the way I feel about nature – especially mountains – quite like he does. I love his way of combining various sciences, philosophies, arts, beliefs, myths and histories to build a whole idea of something. Seems strange to use the word "whole" when the result is often sprawling and not always conclusive. But honestly, I think it'd be a mistake to find a conclusive way to bring all those ideas together. What matters is that those ideas all exist and are, in their own respective ways, true.
In a way, though, there is no such thing as the unknown. Because wherever we go, we carry our worlds within us. [...] So traversing even the most uncharted landscape, we are also traversing the terrain of the known. We carry expectations within us and to an extent we make what we meet conform to those expectations [...]. A raft of largely undetectable assumptions and preconceptions affects the way we perceive and behave in a place. Our cultural baggage – our memory – is weightless, but impossible to leave behind.
This is what Macfarlane wanted to do with this book, I think. To bring all these experiences of mountains together as a catalogue of truths. In my head, different areas of nature exist as multiple things simultaneously, and all of them seem true. Forests are trees – which seems simplistic, but trees in themselves are fascinating, and the biological network which exists between them and other living things is astonishing. I know they're just a biological system. But they're also a place where my imagination runs riot. I don't know how to put it into words. I remember standing in the middle of a dense pine forest (somewhere in Scotland, I'm not sure where) and thinking that something – something – would come out of those trees, and it would be inexplicable and not human and not any kind of creature that I'd seen before.
The same thing happens to me with mountains. I know mountains are evidence of deep time and massive geological change, but at the same time they are the realm of the gods. Sometimes they are like gods to me because they seem alive in a very awesome way.
No, I won't stop this flowery nonsense, I'm enjoying myself.
What I love about holding all these ideas of natural places in my head – as physical/scientific environments and mythological/folkloric/supernatural ones – is that they are not opposites to me. They have their own value to me personally because of the experience and exercise that my brain gets from them. Mountains are both passive and active forces. Macfarlane hits the nail on the head for me regarding the scientific kind:
Yet there is 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.
To be surrounded or dwarfed by something that makes me realise my improbable existence is actually kinda nice and needed. The supernatural side of things does something similar. What I appreciate is that Macfarlane doesn't tell us that there's only one right way to think.
But there was something else in this book, which Macfarlane made very prominent almost from the start: death. No matter how experienced you are, "[w]ith mountains, the gap – the irony – that exists between the imagined and the actual can be wide enough to kill."
It was worth being reminded of, even though it scares me – maybe I prefer seeing mountains from the ground, as a mystery rather than something conquerable. Though sometimes the mountain conquers you. Again, two ideas in my head: you can be killed on, and killed by a mountain.
So while I absolutely loved the parts on the exhilarating power of mountains and high altitude, there was a lot on their destructive and lethal power. I appreciated that, but was still disturbed by it. (My own fault, really: Macfarlane might have described George Mallory's preserved corpse in a way that enticed me to look up images. Silly of me, but very interesting nonetheless. I don't think I'm going to want to climb anything like Everest after that. I'm not built for that stuff.)
So while it was worth having that lingering sense of fatal danger, unfortunately that was the idea that stayed with me past the end of the book. Seems a bit silly, come to think of it, that I based my rating of this book on a feeling of "it reminded me that bad stuff happens, and while I appreciate that warning, I still don't like it". Also Robert Macfarlane has a habit of doing much more dangerous things than I would ever dream of doing. Even living vicariously through his words is sometimes quite scary. I don't know. Maybe I wanted the book to make me feel like I had to go rushing up a mountain afterwards, when the feeling I got was hesitation. Maybe I'm just feeling a bit of a sensitive bean. That exhilarating feeling I have towards mountains will come back eventually, but never to the extent that I'll climb Everest. That's a place I'm happy to leave untouched.
In a way, though, there is no such thing as the unknown. Because wherever we go, we carry our worlds within us. [...] So traversing even the most uncharted landscape, we are also traversing the terrain of the known. We carry expectations within us and to an extent we make what we meet conform to those expectations [...]. A raft of largely undetectable assumptions and preconceptions affects the way we perceive and behave in a place. Our cultural baggage – our memory – is weightless, but impossible to leave behind.
This is what Macfarlane wanted to do with this book, I think. To bring all these experiences of mountains together as a catalogue of truths. In my head, different areas of nature exist as multiple things simultaneously, and all of them seem true. Forests are trees – which seems simplistic, but trees in themselves are fascinating, and the biological network which exists between them and other living things is astonishing. I know they're just a biological system. But they're also a place where my imagination runs riot. I don't know how to put it into words. I remember standing in the middle of a dense pine forest (somewhere in Scotland, I'm not sure where) and thinking that something – something – would come out of those trees, and it would be inexplicable and not human and not any kind of creature that I'd seen before.
The same thing happens to me with mountains. I know mountains are evidence of deep time and massive geological change, but at the same time they are the realm of the gods. Sometimes they are like gods to me because they seem alive in a very awesome way.
No, I won't stop this flowery nonsense, I'm enjoying myself.
What I love about holding all these ideas of natural places in my head – as physical/scientific environments and mythological/folkloric/supernatural ones – is that they are not opposites to me. They have their own value to me personally because of the experience and exercise that my brain gets from them. Mountains are both passive and active forces. Macfarlane hits the nail on the head for me regarding the scientific kind:
Yet there is 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.
To be surrounded or dwarfed by something that makes me realise my improbable existence is actually kinda nice and needed. The supernatural side of things does something similar. What I appreciate is that Macfarlane doesn't tell us that there's only one right way to think.
But there was something else in this book, which Macfarlane made very prominent almost from the start: death. No matter how experienced you are, "[w]ith mountains, the gap – the irony – that exists between the imagined and the actual can be wide enough to kill."
It was worth being reminded of, even though it scares me – maybe I prefer seeing mountains from the ground, as a mystery rather than something conquerable. Though sometimes the mountain conquers you. Again, two ideas in my head: you can be killed on, and killed by a mountain.
So while I absolutely loved the parts on the exhilarating power of mountains and high altitude, there was a lot on their destructive and lethal power. I appreciated that, but was still disturbed by it. (My own fault, really: Macfarlane might have described George Mallory's preserved corpse in a way that enticed me to look up images. Silly of me, but very interesting nonetheless. I don't think I'm going to want to climb anything like Everest after that. I'm not built for that stuff.)
So while it was worth having that lingering sense of fatal danger, unfortunately that was the idea that stayed with me past the end of the book. Seems a bit silly, come to think of it, that I based my rating of this book on a feeling of "it reminded me that bad stuff happens, and while I appreciate that warning, I still don't like it". Also Robert Macfarlane has a habit of doing much more dangerous things than I would ever dream of doing. Even living vicariously through his words is sometimes quite scary. I don't know. Maybe I wanted the book to make me feel like I had to go rushing up a mountain afterwards, when the feeling I got was hesitation. Maybe I'm just feeling a bit of a sensitive bean. That exhilarating feeling I have towards mountains will come back eventually, but never to the extent that I'll climb Everest. That's a place I'm happy to leave untouched.
ellesbelles94's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
swolohan's review
4.0
Great history of mountaineering -- Unfortunately only from a western perspective.
miss_blackbird's review against another edition
4.0
I am an armchair traveller; still I do not understand the mountaineer, but I would very happily read about them.
jilianh's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
"We expect nature to do our bidding, to fall into step with us. Or we overide it with technology, and render its rhythms superfluous. Our need for speed has led us to esteem the streamlined, the dynamic in all things, and that estimation has accelerated us out of sync with the natural world.
But slowness and stasis have their own virtues too, their own aesthetic, and it is well to be reminded of that from time to time."
As someone who grew up near the Canadian Rockies, mountains have always had a special place in my heart. That feeling of awe, or the sublime as mentioned in this book, is like no other.
MacFarlane did such an incredible job of interweaving history, theory, emotion, and personal experience. This book is so many things at once, but they work perfectly together because of how he has connected them. I learned so much about the cultural perception shift and geological history through this book as well.
I find I often struggle to get through slower paced books, but this was different. I felt like I wanted to meander slowly, really having time to feel the stillness that the mountains always brings out in me. It never felt like it was dragging or boring to me.
Perhaps it is just because it appeals to something which is certainly already an interest of mine, but this book was phenomenal. So many beautiful quotes to put feelings I know into words.
(A compilation of highlighted quotes for me in the spoiler tag so I can refer back in future)
"And there, between two layers of grey rock, was a square yard of silver mica, seething brightly in the sunlight - probably the first sunlight to strike it in millions of years. It was like opening up a chest filled to the brim with silver, like opening a book to find a mirror leafed inside it, or like opening a trapdoor to reveal a vault of time so dizzyingly deep that I might have fallen head-first into it."
"We had talked, too, about how much pleasure the fear had brought afterwards. And we had talked, as mountaineers always do, about how strange it is to risk yourself for a mountain, but how central to the experience is that risk and the fear it brings with it."
"About two and a half centuries ago, however, fear started to become fashionable for its own sake. Risk, it was realized, 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."
"'I must have torrents, rocks, pines, dead forest, mountains, rugged paths to go up and down, precipices beside me to frighten me,' remarked Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1785, 'for the odd thing about my liking for precipitous places is that they make me giddy, and I enjoy this giddiness greatly provided that I am safely placed'"
"Had I dropped into the crevasse, the glacier would have gone about its business as surely as if I had not been there. Its internal machinery would have annihilated my body. Had I fallen, like the French Protestant minister, into a crevasse the size of a 'grand and spacious hall', the sides would have closod in over the months, and the space would have diminished from ballroom, to bedroom, to broom cupboard, to coffin."
"My sense of wonder at the frozen waterfall and the halted river derived from the absolute stasis of something that would normally be absolutely turbulent. Perhaps our quickening obsession with speed has to do with our end-of-the worldliness: the latent sense, unique to our modern age, that apocalypse might come either by ice (the death of the sun) or by fire (nuclear holocaust)."
"What simpler allegory of success
could there be than the ascent of a mountain? The summit provides the visible goal, the slopes leading up to it the challenge. When we walk or climb up a mountain we traverse not only the actual terrain of the hillside but also the metaphysical territories of struggle and achievement. To reach a summit is very palpably to have triumphed over adversity: to have conquered something, albeit something utterly useless."
"A sense of success is not the only pleasure which lies in height, however. There is also a joy to be found in the sensory experience of altitude: a bliss which isn't competitive, but contemplative."
"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."
"You could be lonely in a city crowd, but you could find solitude on a mountain-top."
"The upper world was an environment which affected both the mind and the body in ways the cities or the plains never did - in the mountains, you were a different you."
"At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into- that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting uS with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us."
"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."
"The complex aesthetics of ice, sunlight, rock, height, angles and air - what John Ruskin called the 'endless perspicuity of space; the unfatigued veracity of eternal light'- were to the later nineteenth-century mind unquestionably marvellous. Mountains began to exert a considerable and often fatal power of attraction on the human mind."
"Over the course of three centuries, therefore, a tremendous revolution of perception occurred in the West concerning mountains. The qualities for which mountains were once reviled - steepness, desolation, perilousness-came to be numbered among their most prized aspects. So drastic was this revolution that to contemplate it now is to be reminded of a truth about landscapes: that our responses to them are for the most part culturally devised. That is to say. when we look at a landscape, we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there. We attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically possess - savageness, for example, or bleakness - and we value it accordingly. We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory. Although people have traditionally gone into wild places in some way to escape culture or convention, they have in fact perceived that wilderness, as just about everything is perceived, through a filter of associations. Willam Blake put his finger on this truth. 'The tree,' he wrote, which moves some to tears of joy is, in the eyes of others, only a green thing which stands in the way.' The same, historically, holds for mountains. "
"The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' -the sense of time whose units are not
days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years- crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body. "