Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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The book culminates with a chapter on George Mallory's ill-fated attempts at the greatest peak of all, Everest. 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.” 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) Gradually, the team moved up the mountain, establishing successively higher camps. The altitude, the extreme cold and the load-bearing began to take their toll. But as Herzog grew physically weaker, so his conviction strengthened that the summit was attainable. Eventually, on 3 June, he and a climber called Louis Lachenal left Camp V, the highest camp, in a bid for the top of Annapurna.

Cómo y cuándo las montañas pasaron de ser barreras peligrosas e infranqueables, habitadas por bestias y dragones, a suscitar los anhelos más aventureros de quienes se atreven a conquistarlas, incluso poniendo en riesgo su vida? Macfarlane follows this changing attitude towards nature and history, leading eventually to both an aesthetic appreciation of mountains, and then the desire to explore and conquer them. Macfarlane, a mountain lover and climber, has a visceral appreciation of mountains. . . . He is an engaging writer, his commentary, always crisp and relevant, leavened by personal experience beautifully related.”– The Observer (UK) Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.” If you want to read about a heap of travellers, mountaingazers and mountainclimbers, and explorers: read this book.George Mallory, who may have been the first person to climb to the top of Mount Everest, was asked why he was motivated to do so. This book answers the question, both for Mallory and for everyone else (the author included) who walks in mountains, be they less than 1000 metres or more than 8000 metres high. Early mountaineers were lost for words to describe the splendor of the mountains, but Robert Macfarlane is not; in particular, he has a gift for arresting similes.”– The Times Literary Supplement Yet there is also 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.” The transformation of mountain landscapes in the European imagination was an astonishing reversal and that process has rarely been explored so effectively as Robert Macfarlane does in Mountains of the Mind. (...) Macfarlane argues that romanticism continues to dictate our responses to mountain landscapes." - Ed Douglas, The Observer

The last two chapters of the book were the best. The chapter on Everest gave a straightforward account of George Mallory's obsession with climbing Everest that I found compelling, and the final chapter, which is also the shortest chapter, was most like what I expected the book to be about: a critical analysis of the human drive to climb to the top. It wasn’t the first time I had read Hopkins’ immortal line. And my first reaction to it, and its embedding in the poem in which it features made me question MacFarlane’s deployment of it as an epigraph to his book, and indeed, in its title. By now, my slow reading was more by choice. I was savouring the passages I read, seeing the world through new eyes.

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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."