MOUNTAINS OF THE MIND: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights were Transformed into Experiences of
Indomitable Spirit
by Robert Macfarlane (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003) – Review by Ron Dart
O the mind, mind has mountains – Gerard Manley Hopkins
history, taken to the mountains the way we do in our time and ethos? Have white
crowned peaks, rock diadems and spear spires always drawn the curious,
energetic, skilled and interested? Have mountains always been a place of
allure, delight, charm and attraction? Or, is the passion for the mountains and
out of doors hiking, climbing and glacier traverses more a product of the last
few centuries? If this is the case, why is it? And, deeper yet, what are the
reasons (complicated and diverse though they might be) that women
and men take to the mountains, challenging rock rims and high perched peaks?
Mountains of the Mind
attempts, in a variety of ways, to answer these questions. Such abiding
questions, though, are not merely answered from the safe confines of the
academic and library chair. Robert Macfarlane, to his credit, attempts to scale the peaks of such
answers from a variety of routes. Macfarlane is Scottish, a climber and
international in experience and interest. He has taken to many peaks, and his
answers to the questions raised above emerge both from within himself and the
multiple voices from those who have taken to the peaks in the past. Mountains of the Mind is as much about
the internal ascents, hard places, difficult routes, worrisome crevasses, long
trails, fears and insecurities that dog one and all as it is about the external
and hard realities of real mountains and packed snow places.
Mountains of the Mind is
divided into 9 compact and enticing chapters: 1) Possession, 2) The Great Stone
Book, 3) The Pursuit of Fear, 4) Glaciers and Ice: The Streams of Time, 5)
Altitude: The Summit and the View, 6) Walking off the Map, 7) A New Heaven and
a New Earth, 8) Everest and 9) The Snow
Hare. Each of these compelling chapters, story told well, draws the reader more
and more into the world of mountain lore and legend and the reasons why many
turn to such places.
Macfarlane is never shy about telling his tale and trips to
the high regions, his conscious and subconscious reasons for turning to such
alluring and evocative places and what other mountains have taught him about
such a journey. Mountains of the Mind is
also about cultural shifts that began in the 17th-18th
centuries in the west, and how such cultural shifts have converted still and
silent rocks into places of peak bagging and spiritual pilgrimages.
Macfarlane, to some degree, follows the earlier thesis of
Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom
and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (1959),
in tracking and tracing the interest in mountaineering to the 17th-18th
centuries. Many of the literary clues that Nicolson has provided in her classic
work were followed by Macfarlane in Mountains
of the Mind. Both Nicolson and Macfarlane are aware that mountains have
played a substantive role in classical cultures, but the general and widespread
fascination with mountains and the environment that holds and draws many today
is a new phenomenon. It is this broader interest in the mountains (and what it
means for new cultural ways of seeing and being) that interests Nicolson and
Macfarlane. The difference between these two, though, is that Nicolson in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory
studied this shift from an academic, historic and literary perspective, whereas
Macfarlane is interested in these areas, but he is equally interested from the
perspective of the mountaineer, also.
The final 2 chapters in Mountains
of the Mind draw this fine book together in a suggestive way. Macfarlane
ponders, in chapter 8 (Everest) why George Mallory was drawn so irresistibly
and fatally to Everest. Each of the three trips is discussed in some detail,
and Macfarlane amply illustrates that he has read most of Mallory’s letters and
journals well. Why would Mallory leave his wife and three young children for
some barren rocks and hard ice and snow peaks? What was the fatal attraction?
What was the draw and history of those who had gone before Mallory that
prepared this young Galahad to give his life to an unforgiving and ancient slab
of frigid and frozen white at the very crest of the world? ‘Everest’ is a fine chapter. Macfarlane
probes and probes the mind of Mallory, and, by doing so, the minds of all those
who turn to the peaks to discover the reasons for the drive to such isolated
and barren places.
Why did this become both an addiction and tragic attraction
for Mallory? Why did he need to be the first to stand on the peak of Everest,
and what were the more important things he sacrificed in the process?
Macfarlane attempts to answer these sorts of questions in the penultimate
chapter in Mountains of the Mind. It
is these inner mountains of the mind, in the end, that are the most interesting
to traverse, and Macfarlane, roped well, does take to such heights, the dead
Mallory his guide.
The final chapter, ‘The Snow Hare’, is the most illusive and
compelling. Macfarlane, on the peaks of a whiteout summit, meets a snow hare.
Needless to say, such a meeting has all sorts of mythic meanings. Macfarlane
allows the reader to unpack the metaphor from such an occurrence. It reminds me
of the time I was sitting on a mountainside, and 2 white deer momentarily
appeared, approached me, then disappeared. Such moments are quite magical, and rare is
the experience.
If some concerns might be raised about this book, and there
are some to be pondered, the primary one might be the way Marfarlane, like
Nicolson before him, has tended to see the substantial shift in the way we see
mountains in the 17th and 18th centuries. Both Nicolson
and Macfarlane offer a fleeting nod to the Classical western tradition (albeit
in a spotty and questionable way), but neither delve into the deeper and older
attitudes towards the mountains in both the western and eastern traditions.
This much older line and lineage can be corrected by a read of Sacred Mountains of the World (1990), by
Edwin Bernbaum. Sacred Mountains of the
World is a stunning visual tour with an insightful text as a hiking
companion. In short, the larger cultural shifts in the way we see mountains
that Nicolson and Macfarlane linger so long at do need to be checked and
corrected by the more compelling, older and convincing work of Bernbaum in Sacred Mountains of the World.
Mountains of the Mind
is a must read, and for those of us who are Canadians and belong to the Alpine Club of Canada, there
are some interesting comments from Mallory about Edward Wheeler and the 1921
attempt to climb Everest.
RSD