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Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination

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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

Fue The Sacred Theory la que comenzó la erosión de la ortodoxia bíblica, según la cual, la Tierra siempre había tenido el mismo aspecto, y fue The Sacred Theory la que conformaría de manera crucial la forma de percibir e imaginar las montañas. Que ahora seamos capaces de imaginar un pasado —una historia profunda— de los paisajes se debe en parte a las cavilaciones de Burnet sobre la destrucción a lo largo de diez años.” Pisando por ese crujiente popurrí geológico, guía en mano, me lanzaba sobre las piedras, las reunía y las guardaba en la bolsa de lona que llevaba, donde sonaban al entrechocar unas con otras. Era como tener el mejor quiosco de chucherías del mundo a mi libre disposición: nunca llegué a creerme del todo que pudiera llevarme las piedras. Las acarreaba hasta casa, las colocaba en los huecos del alféizar de la ventana y las mantenía lustrosas con agua.” From Robert Macfarlane, the acclaimed author of The Old Ways and Underland—a celebration of the language of landscape and the power of words to shape our sense of place 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."Twelve years after I first read Annapurna - twelve years during which I had spent most of my holidays in the mountains - running my finger along the spines in a second-hand bookshop in Scotland, I came across another copy. That night I sat up late and read it through again, and again fell under its spell. Soon afterwards, I booked flights and a climbing partner - an Army friend of mine called Toby Till - for a week in the Alps.

Me ha encantado. Sé que estamos en enero, pero ha entrado de lleno en mis favoritos de 2022. Estoy segura. Lo recomiendo muchísimo tanto si sois habituales de literatura de montaña como si es vuestro primer acercamiento. Precioso. Lleno de frases para enmarcar, crónicas personales, geografía e historia, y, por supuesto, vivencias crudas, propias del alpinismo. Aquella noche nevó y me quedé tumbado y en vela escuchando el rumor de los gruesos copos en el toldo de la tienda. Se acumulaban y formaban oscuros continentes de sombra en la tela, hasta que su peso se hacía excesivo para la pendiente del toldo y resbalaban hasta el suelo con un suave silbido.” It's a glorious book about human yearning, desires, and the need to define who we are, and our place in the world.

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Mcfarlane has written a book on the fascination with mountains and has provided us with a survey of the associative literature, history and personal accounts. He documents the changing attitudes of men to mountains. He tries to answer the question 'Why do people still go to mountains? He answers this by showing us images, emotions and metaphors. "The way you read landscapes and interpret them is a function of what you carry into them with you, and of cultural tradition. I think that happens in every sphere of life. But I think in mountains that disjunction between the imagined and the real becomes very visible. People die because they mistake the imagined for the real". Mountains of the Mind is a tumult of delights all the way. I found it particularly rewarding on early puzzling about the origin of mountains." - Roy Herbert, New Scientist At once a fascinating work of history and a beautifully written mediation on how memory, imagination, and the landscape of mountains are joined together in our minds and under our feet.”– Forbes Once we thought monsters lived there. In the Enlightenment we scaled them to commune with the sublime. Soon, we were racing to conquer their summits in the name of national pride.

A hauntingly beautiful diptych of works inspired by Robert Macfarlane’s travels with celebrated collaborators to two eerie corners of England. McFarlane juxtaposes the cultural history with his own personal accounts. Some reviewers are of the opinion that the personal stories were unnecessary but I didn't mind his own input and I felt that it was a nice diversion from the more academic parts of the book.Three centuries ago, no one was interested in mountains and other wild places. The land could not be cultivated, nor was there any point in possessing them and the people who inhabited these heights were considered a lesser human. They were considered no go areas. But in the middle of the Eighteenth century, this perception of the mountain began to change. The premise of the sublime, the balance point of fear and exhilaration that could be achieved when climbing, coupled with the sense that the mountains were much, much older than previously thought, meant that the great thinkers of the age became interested in the how and why they were formed. Much of Macfarlane's terrain is well known and previously travelled, most recently in Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory. Macfarlane performs for mountains the service Francis Spufford did for the polar regions in his influential cultural history, I May be Some Time. But Macfarlane, a mountain lover and climber, has a more visceral appreciation of mountains than Schama. He is also a more engaging writer, his commentary, always crisp and relevant, leavened by personal experience beautifully related. 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

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