Stapleton suggests hitting the road to get as far away from his problems as possible; the white line indicating the markings of the highway. I didn't have any spare gloves. But there wasn't time to worry about it anyway, because the rotten snow which had just about tolerated our weight during the ascent would already be melting in the morning sun. We needed to get down as fast as possible.

It's clear to Stapleton that there is a place absent of anxieties and struggles, but he's not yet reached it. He's understanding of the fact patience is required. 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 have ever wondered why people climb mountains, 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.”—Fergus Fleming, author of Ninety Degrees NorthMoreover, mountains were dangerous places to be. It was believed that avalanches could be triggered by stimuli as light as a cough, the foot of a beetle, or the brush of a bird's wing as it swooped low across a loaded snow-slope. You might fall between the blue jaws of a crevasse, to be regurgitated years later by the glacier, pulped and rigid. Or you might encounter a god, demi-god or monster angry at having their territory trespassed upon - for mountains were conventionally the habitat of the supernatural and the hostile. In his famous Travels, John Mandeville described the tribe of Assassins who lived high among the peaks of the Elbruz range, presided over by the mysterious 'Old Man of the Mountains'. In Thomas More's Utopia the Zapoletes - a 'hideous, savage and fierce' race - are reputed to dwell 'in the high mountains'. True, mountains had in the past provided refuge for beleaguered peoples - it was to the mountains that Lot and his daughters fled when they were driven out of Zoar, for instance - but for the most part they were a form of landscape to be avoided. Go around mountains by all means, it was thought, along their flanks or between them if absolutely necessary - as many merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and missionaries had to - but certainly not up them. I was a twelve-year-old in my grandparents' house in the Scottish Highlands when I first came across one of the great stories of mountaineering: The Fight for Everest, an account of the 1924 British expedition during which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared near the summit of Everest. Three centuries ago, mountains were considered forbidding and forbidden—the abodes of dragons and other ill-tempered grotesque beasts. But with the growing recognition that the Earth’s surface had not been created once and for all but was slowly evolving, mountains came to be seen as the unexplored text of the Earth’s story—a terrain that scientists, adventurers, naturalists, and, finally, travelers began to explore. In Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane blends cultural history, meditation, and memoir to show how early geologists helped transform our perceptions of the wild, chaotic landscapes; how the allure of height increasingly drew fearless climbers, culminating in the romantic figure of George Mallory, the passionate Englishman who died on Mount Everest in 1924; and how the elemental beauty of snow and ice coalesced into an aesthetic of the sublime. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. There was something unusual in the way I saw Lachenal and everything around us. I smiled to myself at the paltriness of our efforts. But all sense of exertion was gone, as though there were no longer any gravity. This diaphanous landscape, this quintessence of purity - these were not the mountains I knew; they were the mountains of my dreams. "

He didn’t even reach the summit although his group had one, notable achievement of sorts: they were the first to discover a climbable path towards the very top of the tallest mountain in the world located at its so-called “North Face” (thus, maybe, where the now famous brand of outdoor gears and apparel got its name). I felt my feet freezing, but paid little attention. The highest mountain to be climbed by man lay under our feet! The names of our predecessors on these heights chased each other through my mind: Mummery, Mallory and Irvine, Bauer, WeIzenbach, Tilman, Shipton. How many of them were dead - how many had found on these mountains what, to them, was the finest end of all . . . I knew the end was near, but it was the end that all mountaineers wish for - an end in keeping with their ruling passion. I was consciously grateful to the mountains for being so beautiful for me that day, and as awed by their silence as if I had been in church. I was in no pain, and had no worry." Then came a shout. "Cailloux! Cailloux!" I heard yelled from above, in a female voice. The words echoed down towards us. I looked up to see where they had come from. To me / High mountains are a feeling', declared Byron's Childe Harold, as he stared reflectively into the still waters of Lac Leman. Each of the following chapters tries to trace a genealogy for a different way of feeling about mountains, to show how that feeling was formed, inherited, reshaped and passed on until it became accepted by an individual or an age. The final chapter discusses how Mount Everest came to possess George Mallory, to cause him to leave his wife and family, and eventually to kill him. Mallory exemplifies the themes of the book, for in him all of these ways of feeling about mountains converged with unusual and lethal force. In this chapter, I have blended Mallory's letters and journals together with my own suppositions to write a speculative recreation of the three Everest expeditions of the 1920s in which Mallory took part. 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.

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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".

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: How Desolate and Forbidding Heights Were Transformed Into Experiences of Indomitable Spirit So much of mountaineering today seems aggressively performative, meaning that it is perfectly in keeping with the 21st century social media-driven zeitgeist. Climbers keep finding new ways to be the “first” to do something. One of the symbols of conspicuous wealth is paying an outfitter to drag you to the top of Everest. Somewhat less ambitious influencers travel to the world’s other iconic wonders, where they proceed to take a selfie of themselves, sometimes dying in the process. And while Antarctica even now exists for most of us purely in the imagination, mountains are a more common currency. Simply put, more of us have more to say about them. Macfarlane argues that romanticism continues to dictate our responses to mountain landscapes. 'Those who travel to mountain tops,' he writes, 'are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.' But it's more complicated than that. Affordable transport has allowed people from all classes to experience the freedom mountains offer. The childish imagination has more trust in the transparency of a story than the adult imagination: a readier faith that things happened the way they are said to have done. It is more powerful in its capacity for sympathy, too, and as I read those books I lived intensely with and through the explorers. I spent evenings with them in their tents, thawing pemmican hoosh over a seal-blubber stove as the wind skirled outside. I sledge-hauled through thigh-deep polar snow. I bumped over sastrugi, tumbled down gullies, clambered up arêtes and strode along ridges. From the summits of mountains I surveyed the world as though it were a map. Ten times or more I nearly died.This was a hard book to read at the start. I'm a bedtime reader, and there were so many words I had to look up! Partly because of jargon and partly because I'm not as eloquent in English as I might have thought. I don’t read a lot of books like Mountains of the Mind. My bookshelves are lined with hefty volumes filled with high-stress historical events, of war and plague, oppression and political upheaval. In troubling times, I was drawn to this book’s low stakes, its thoughtful deliberations, and its gorgeous nature writing. Mountains are exceptionally hard to describe in words; even pictures often fail. But Macfarlane is exceptionally talented at describing indescribable sights.

In his account of the climb, Herzog describes becoming progressively more detached from what was happening to him. The clarity and thinness of the air, the crystalline beauty of the mountains and the strange painlessness of frostbite conspired to send him into a state of numbed serenity, which made him insensitive to his worsening injuries:Cravings wavered between an intense desire to transcend deep in a timewarp to life the way it used to be and yearning for life to be no more.