Los catastrofistas creían que la historia de la Tierra estaba dominada por grandes revoluciones geofísicas: un Götterdämmerung, o más, que había convulsionado la Tierra en el pasado con agua, hielo y fuego destruyendo casi la vida. La Tierra era un cementerio, una necrópolis en la que se encontraban enterradas innumerables especies ya extintas. Drásticos maremotos, tsunamis, grandes terremotos, explosiones volcánicas, el paso de cometas: estos eran los fenómenos que habían sacudido la superficie terrestre y le habían dado su forma presente.” entendemos la mezcla de horror y maravilla de Blaise Pascal al comprender que el hombre ocupa una posición tambaleante entre dos abismos: el mundo atómico invisible, con su «infinidad de universos, cada cual con su firmamento, sus planetas y su Tierra» y el cosmos invisible, tan desmesurado que no se ve, también con su «infinidad de universos» que se suceden imparablemente, cada cual más lejos, en el cielo nocturno.”

Macfarlane, who continues his family's tradition of climbing, has assembled 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 ?"" - Stephen Lyons, San Francisco Chronicle A crisp historical study of the sensations and emotions people have brought to (and taken from) mountains, laced with the author’s own experiences scrambling among the peaks. Educated at Nottingham High School, Pembroke College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, he is currently a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge.

But Longinus and his intellectual descendants had been concerned with the Sublime as a literary effect: how language, not landscape, could be lofty, grand or inspiring.” Moreover, 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. 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.

Macfarlane's "history of the imagination" is resolutely Eurocentric, and little space is granted to the non-Western mind (.....) Mountains of the Mind is, broadly, a cultural history interleaved with autobiographical vignettes (the author's agent told him to "put an 'I' into it"). The latter are nicely handled." - Ian Pindar, Times Literary Supplement Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.” Over and over I read that passage, and I wanted nothing more than to be one of those two tiny dots, fighting for survival in the thin air. There are many books on climbing and climbers, and this is one of the best and most unusual I have read.”– The Times (UK) One passage of the book excited me more than any other. It was the description by Noel Odell, the expedition's geologist, of his last sighting of Mallory and Irvine:

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It is these very dangers, this alternation of hope and fear, the continual agitation kept alive by these sensations in his heart, which excite the huntsman, just as they animate the gambler, the warrior, the sailor and, even to a certain point, the naturalist among the Alps whose life resembles closely, in some respects, that of the chamois hunter." The book culminates with a chapter on George Mallory's ill-fated attempts at the greatest peak of all, Everest. Book Genre: Adventure, Climbing, Environment, History, Mountaineering, Nature, Nonfiction, Outdoors, Philosophy, Sports, Travel

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. The basis for the new documentary film, Mountain: A Breathtaking Voyage into the Extreme. Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert McFarlane reveals how the mystery of the world’s highest places has came to grip the Western imagination—and perennially draws legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes. Niet bij dit boek - in dit boek reizen we slechts af en toe mee met MacFarlane - het gaat echt over de geschiedenis van de mensheid en hun relatie tot het gebergte, met de fascinatie voor hoogte en de ultieme offers die worden gebracht om dat ene doel te bereiken. 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.

Over the centuries, though, this has obviously changed. Writers and painters began to look on mountains as things of beauty. Geologists studied them in their efforts to describe the creation of earth itself. With the reputation of mountains growing, adventurers began to assault their slopes, risking all for an ephemeral thrill, which then had to be rationalized at length.

It snowed that night, and l lay awake listening to the heavy flakes falling on to the flysheet of our tent. They clumped together to make dark continents of shadow on the fabric, until the drifts became too heavy for the slope of the tent and slid with a soft hiss down to the ground. In the small hours the snow stopped, but when we unzipped the tent door at 6 a.m. there was an ominous yellowish storm light drizzling through the clouds. We set off apprehensively towards the ridge. The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen on to which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations." It's a glorious book about human yearning, desires, and the need to define who we are, and our place in the world. MOUNTAINS OF THE MIND HOW DESOLATE AND FORBIDDING HEIGHTS WERE TRANSFORMED INTO EXPERIENCES OF INDOMITABLE SPIRIT MacFarlane traces the roots of our love affair with mountains and includes advancements in geology and our growing understanding of how the earth was formed. He also offers an insightful reflection on what drives climbers to pursue their goals so obsessively despite the potentially tragic consequences. But while MacFarlane's research is extensive, he's careful not to let it overwhelm his story. He rhapsodizes so eloquently about the beauty and peace he has experienced while climbing that it's clear this talented writer understands the seductive power of his subject all too well. Summer 2003 Selection bn.comThe 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. 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 That was it - I was sold on adventure. In one of the reading binges which only the expanses of childhood time permit, I plundered my grandfather's library and by the end of that summer I had read a dozen or so of the most famous real-life exploration stories from the mountains and the poles, including Apsley Cherry-Garrard's tale of Antarctic endurance, The Worst Journey in the World, John Hunt's The Ascent of Everest and Edward Whymper's bloody account of his Scrambles Amongst the Alps. A new kind of exploration writing, perhaps even the birth of a new genre, which doesn’t just defy classification–it demands a whole new category of its own.”– The Telegraph (UK)