Mountains of the Mind Read Online Free Page A
Author: Robert Macfarlane
extreme hardship and even greater risks in their bids to reach the summits of Caucasian, Andean and Himalayan mountains – Ushba, Popocatépetl, Nanga Parbat, Chimborazo, or Kazbek, where Vulcan was said to have chained and bolted Prometheus to the rock.
The imaginative potency of these greater peaks around the turn of the nineteenth century was formidable, and they frequently became objects of obsession within the minds of their individual admirers. Kanchenjunga, the 8,000-metre peak visible in good weather from the white-roofed hill-station of Darjeeling, enthralled decades of sahibs and memsahibs escaping the lowland heat of the Indian summer. ‘Clear and clean against the intense blue sky the snowy summit of Kinchinjunga,’ intoned Francis Younghusband, the GreatGamer who led the British attack on Tibet in 1904, ‘ethereal as spirit, white and pure in the sunshine … We are uplifted.’ An avid public followed the fortunes of Martin Conway’s bold 1892 expedition to Gasherbrum in the Karakorum via dispatches to
The Times
of London. And Everest, the highest and most potent of them all, came to enchant the British
entière
, who considered it very much their mountain. Among the enchanted was George Mallory, whose death on its shoulder in 1924 shocked the nation. A newspaper obituary for Mallory and Irvine drew admiring attention to the ‘close link of minds between the people at home and the assailants themselves’.
Today, the emotions and attitudes which impelled the early mountaineers still prosper in the Western imagination: indeed if anything they are more unshiftably ensconced there. Mountain-worship is a given to millions of people. The vertical, the ferocious, the icy – all these are now automatically venerated forms of landscape, images of which permeate an urbanized Western culture increasingly hungry for even second-hand experiences of wildness and wilderness. Mountain-going has been one of the fastest growing leisure activities of the past twenty years. An estimated 10 million Americans go mountaineering annually, and 50 million go hiking. Some 4 million people in Britain consider themselves to be hill-walkers of one stripe or another. Global sales of outdoor products and services are reckoned at $10 billion annually, and growing.
What makes mountain-going peculiar among leisure activities is that it demands of some of its participants that they die. In seven murderous weeks in the Alps in the summer of 1997, 103 people were killed. The average annual death toll on the Mont Blanc massif comes to almost three figures. Some winters more people perish in the mountains of Scotland than on the roads surrounding them. When Mallory climbed Everest, it was the last bastion of unconquerable earth, the ‘Third Pole’. It is now a gargantuan,tawdry, frozen Taj Mahal, an elaborately frosted wedding-cake up and down which climbing companies annually yo-yo hundreds of under-experienced clients. Its slopes are studded with modern corpses: most lie within what has become popularly known as the Death Zone, the altitude bracket within which the human body enters a gradual but unstoppable process of degeneration.
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
The imaginative potency of these greater peaks around the turn of the nineteenth century was formidable, and they frequently became objects of obsession within the minds of their individual admirers. Kanchenjunga, the 8,000-metre peak visible in good weather from the white-roofed hill-station of Darjeeling, enthralled decades of sahibs and memsahibs escaping the lowland heat of the Indian summer. ‘Clear and clean against the intense blue sky the snowy summit of Kinchinjunga,’ intoned Francis Younghusband, the GreatGamer who led the British attack on Tibet in 1904, ‘ethereal as spirit, white and pure in the sunshine … We are uplifted.’ An avid public followed the fortunes of Martin Conway’s bold 1892 expedition to Gasherbrum in the Karakorum via dispatches to
The Times
of London. And Everest, the highest and most potent of them all, came to enchant the British
entière
, who considered it very much their mountain. Among the enchanted was George Mallory, whose death on its shoulder in 1924 shocked the nation. A newspaper obituary for Mallory and Irvine drew admiring attention to the ‘close link of minds between the people at home and the assailants themselves’.
Today, the emotions and attitudes which impelled the early mountaineers still prosper in the Western imagination: indeed if anything they are more unshiftably ensconced there. Mountain-worship is a given to millions of people. The vertical, the ferocious, the icy – all these are now automatically venerated forms of landscape, images of which permeate an urbanized Western culture increasingly hungry for even second-hand experiences of wildness and wilderness. Mountain-going has been one of the fastest growing leisure activities of the past twenty years. An estimated 10 million Americans go mountaineering annually, and 50 million go hiking. Some 4 million people in Britain consider themselves to be hill-walkers of one stripe or another. Global sales of outdoor products and services are reckoned at $10 billion annually, and growing.
What makes mountain-going peculiar among leisure activities is that it demands of some of its participants that they die. In seven murderous weeks in the Alps in the summer of 1997, 103 people were killed. The average annual death toll on the Mont Blanc massif comes to almost three figures. Some winters more people perish in the mountains of Scotland than on the roads surrounding them. When Mallory climbed Everest, it was the last bastion of unconquerable earth, the ‘Third Pole’. It is now a gargantuan,tawdry, frozen Taj Mahal, an elaborately frosted wedding-cake up and down which climbing companies annually yo-yo hundreds of under-experienced clients. Its slopes are studded with modern corpses: most lie within what has become popularly known as the Death Zone, the altitude bracket within which the human body enters a gradual but unstoppable process of degeneration.
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