276°
Posted 20 hours ago

The Living Mountain (Canons): A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland: 6

£4.995£9.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Even though it is so short, Shepherd still manages to covey the sense of place, the beauty and the wildness of the Cairngorms with such amazing brevity. Her emphasis is on human activity and in that sense, as Robert Macfarlane rightly states in his introduction, she presents a specific form of humanism.

It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. I read this book before a winter climbing trip to the Cairngorms, and know I will revisit this book as often as I revisit the mountains.The manuscript was completed in 1944, she showed it to a friend, who although loving it wondered whether it might not need a map and some photographs. Featuring a fascinating introduction by Val McDermid and new illustrations by Juan Esteban Rodríguez, each copy has been signed by both the introducer and the illustrator.

You could see Ghosh’s tale as a simple retelling of the history of colonisation and extractive industrialisation, the twin themes that he has explored at least since the publication of The Hungry Tide in 2004. This contains some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in a long time but is not going to please everyone. Moisture in the air is also the cause of those shifts in the apparent size, remoteness, and height in the sky of familiar hills. It reminded me very much of Gregory Bateson and his intuition about everything being pervaded by 'mind'. I loved how the author put forth the notion of the life-force, the spirit of the mountain (as a stand in for nature more broadly), which has been destroyed as a result of unthinking human intervention.And while it is certainly true that, listening to Jenny Sturgeon’s songs with Nan Shepherd’s book at your elbow, it is easy to hear the conversation between them, the strength of The Living Mountain (the album) is that the songs work in and of themselves. The music piece draws inspiration from photographs that Awoiska made for Larcher in the mountains of his native Tirol (Austria). She explicitly refers to Taoism and Buddhism and the way in which interaction between human physicality (being in the body) and seemingly 'lifeless' matter is nevertheless possible. Quite the result for a book that had sat, quietly in a drawer, for more than three decades after Shepherd wrote it.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment