Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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A convincing book of historical evidence alongside his own oxygen-deprived experiences in an attempt to answer the age old question, 'Why climb the mountain?' "— San Francisco Chronicle If you want to read about a heap of travellers, mountaingazers and mountainclimbers, and explorers: read this book. But what is Hopkins’ line doing, serving as an epigraph to such a book? Hopkins’ poem is about melancholia; indeed, it might be one of the most powerful and moving explorations of the mind’s travails. Here is how I read his line: our mind is capable of entertaining thoughts and feelings which contain within them chasms of despair, points at which we stare into a dark abyss, an unfathomable one, with invisible depths. These are our own private hells, glimpses of which we catch when we walk up to the edge and look. The effect on the reader–especially one who has been to the mountains–is dramatic; you are reminded of the frightening heights from which you can gaze down on seemingly endless icy and windswept slopes, the lower reaches of which are shrouded with their own mysterious darkness; and you are reminded too, of the darkest thoughts you have entertained in your most melancholic moments. If you have ever wondered why people climb mountains, then here is your answer. Part history, part personal observation, this is a fascinating study of our (sometimes fatal) obsession with height. A brilliant book, beautifully written."

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 I think I haven't been this emotionally compromised by non-fiction since finishing Erebus: The Story of a Ship about the same time last year. I think it helps that I seem to be about as obsessed about landscapes, history, and polar exploration as Robert Macfarlane, and only slightly less about mountains. It is books that first truly enraptured him, his grandfather's collection of adventurers' tales of Everest and elsewhere ideal fodder and feast for a child's imagination.Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination is a book by British writer Robert Macfarlane published in 2003 about the history of the human fascination with mountains. The book takes its title from a line by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and combines history with first-person narrative. He considers why people are drawn to mountains despite their obvious dangers, and examines the powerful, and sometimes fatal hold that mountains can come to have over the imagination. The book's heroes include the mountaineer George Mallory, and its influences include the writing of Simon Schama and Francis Spufford. [1] In the end, Macfarlane criticizes Mallory for devoting more time to the mountain than his wife and notes that he has personally sworn off high-risk mountaineering. The New York Times's John Rothchild praised the book, writing "There's fascinating stuff here, and a clever premise, but Mountains of the Mind may cause recovering climbaholics to trace their addiction to their early homework assignments and file class-action lawsuits against their poetry teachers." [2] Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. 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."

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.Ezard, John (5 December 2003). "Mountain man wins Guardian book prize". The Guardian . Retrieved 4 July 2018. A rough memorial cairn is built for the dead Sherpas at Camp III. Bruce is sanguine about the accident. Nobody's fault, he says. Nor do the families of the dead men seem interested in blaming anyone. Their men died when they were meant to die. But Mallory won't be consoled. He considers their death his doing. "It was not a desperate game, I thought," he writes to Ruth, "with the plans we made. Perhaps with the habit of dealing with certain kinds of danger one becomes accustomed to measuring some that are best left unmeasured and untried…the three of us were deceived; there wasn't an inkling of danger among us." He is aware, too, of how close he came to dying. "It was a wonderful escape for me & we may indeed be thankful for that together. Dear love when I think what your grief would have been I humbly thank God. I am alive…". An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.