The book which undoubtedly made the deepest impression on me was Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, dictated by Herzog from a hospital bed in 195I. He couldn't write it himself because he had no fingers left. Herzog was the leader of a team of French mountaineers which, in the spring of 1950, travelled to the Nepal Himalaya with the aim of being the first group to summit one of the world's fourteen 8,000-metre peaks. 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. 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.

PDF / EPUB File Name: Mountains_of_the_Mind_-_Robert_Macfarlane.pdf, Mountains_of_the_Mind_-_Robert_Macfarlane.epub Until the 19th century, few saw any reason to scale the serious Alpine (much less the Andean and Himalayan) peaks, but after a while that very ideal -- the practically pointless (and often very dangerous) ascent to -- ideally -- a mountain-top where no one had ever stood -- became a widespread ambition and popular sport.

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The other foundation for this intellectual elevation was Western empiricism. The new science of geology undermined assumptions about the age of the Earth, introducing into Western thought the idea of deep time. Mountains were no longer a barren, unchanging nothing but places worthy of scientific inquiry. When I read this passage, it made absolute sense to me, despite the intervening centuries. As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a "continual agitation alive" in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear - this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died. Macfarlane presents the material well, though occasionally (a bit too frequently for comfort) he over-reaches:

No animal or plant could exist here. In the pure morning light this absence of all life, this utter destitution of nature, seemed only to intensify our own strength. How could we expect anyone else to understand the peculiar exhilaration that we drew from this barrenness, when man's natural tendency is to turn towards everything in nature that is rich and generous?' When Hannibal crossed the Alps in ancient times, it was for the practical purpose of crossing a barrier with solid objectives in mind: surprise and conquest. Sea voyagers did what they did to find gold or to fill in the maps with seized colonial holdings for royalty. Nature, or nature for its own sake, was never a goal, it was an obstacle; something to be feared, surmounted, but not surmounted strictly to surmount it. It was an inconvenience, a challenge in the way of an end game. 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."

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Of course the significant difference between de Saussure's chamois hunter and me was that for the hunter, risk wasn't optional - it came with the job. I sought risk out, however. I courted it. In fact, I paid for it. This is the great shift which has taken place in the history of risk. Risk has always been taken, but for a long time it was taken with some ulterior purpose in mind: scientific advancement, personal glory, financial gain. About two-and-a-half centuries ago, however, fear started to become fashionable for its own sake. Risk, it was realised, brought its own reward: the sense of physical exhilaration and elation which we would now attribute to the effects of adrenaline. And so risk-taking - the deliberate inducement of fear - became desirable: became a commodity.

Liberated from fear, he achieves a serene, practical awareness and what has seemed like a dead end now becomes a way forward. Most of us regard risking our lives in this way as foolish, but such profound experiences are compelling, even addictive.

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. An early significant step towards this is Thomas Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681), which, he believes, helped make us "able to imagine a past -- a deep history -- for landscapes". Wonderfully illuminating. . . . An exhilarating blend of scholarship and adventure, displaying dazzling erudition, acute powers of analysis, a finely honed sense of cultural history and a passionate sense of the author’s engagement with his subject."— Los Angeles Times Above all, I was drawn to those men who travelled to climb the high peaks of the Greater Ranges. So many of them died. I learned the roll-call by heart: Mallory and Irvine on Everest, Mummery on Nanga Parbat, Donkin and Fox on Koshtan-Tau . . . The list went on and on, through the ranks of the less familiar. The imaginative light the mountaineers cast over me was like that cast by the polar expeditions - the beauty and danger of the landscape, the immensities of space, the utter uselessness of it all - but with high altitudes in place of high latitudes. To be sure these people had their faults. They were beset by the sins of their age: racism, sexism and an unflagging snobbery. And mingled with their bravery was an acute selfishness. But I didn't notice these traits at the time. All I saw was impossibly brave men stepping out into the brilliant light of the unknown. 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