The Living Mountain

"I spent a week in January in a bothy in the woods in the Highlands, looking up at the Cairngorm range, where I read Nan Shepard’s great classic for the first time, having previously seen Robert Macfarlane sing its praises . It was the perfect time and place to do so: this slim work of nature writing, first published in 1977, is an account of gentle and repeated interaction with those same mountains in all seasons, and requires total immersion. I read from dawn to dusk then finished it by the light from a wood-burning stove – something I felt she might appreciate."

"This book was written long before it was published. A draft was completed around 1945. She had written some fiction and poetry before. Neil Gunn was a mentor of hers, and she sent it to him. I think he said something like, this is really good but I’m not quite sure it should be published. So she stuck it in a drawer. It was finally published by Aberdeen University Press in 1977, and then reissued in 2011 with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane. Now it’s considered a minor classic alongside another half-forgotten book, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine. Nan Shepherd walked, not on a linear journey, but over a lifetime. She went ‘into’ the mountains, not onto them, so a very different approach to the view that mountains are there to be climbed and conquered. She was probably quite an eccentric. She would swim naked, walk barefoot. She wanted to immerse herself in the landscape. She realised that striding out over the landscape for hours and hours was a liberating experience, even a metaphysical experience. So I do think that the book can be shoehorned into a list of hiking memoirs. She lived to the age of 88, but her memoir was pushed away in a drawer. Now it’s a modern classic, even though it’s only novella-length—around 30,000 words. It shines like a highly polished diamond. It’s absolutely beautiful, and the more you read it the more you get out of it. I love books that you can read again and again, and still find something new in them."

"Yes, I do like extremes. I love this book in so many ways. It’s maybe ‘the woman’s approach’, or the ‘embodied approach.’ It’s about experiencing the totality of the mountain. At first I wasn’t sure about including it on this list, because you could argue it’s not about mountaineering. But then, what is the definition of mountaineering? It’s focused on the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, but I guess what you could say that what she’s doing is ‘hill walking,’ but let’s not split hairs. The Living Mountain is her perspective of going out, using your body and all of your senses and moving in very particular ways—similar to what a mountaineer or rock climber does. She and Bonatti do similar things but have different approaches and techniques for accessing and understanding and engaging with the mountain. Yes. Her goal is to know the mountain in its entirety, the living mountain, and to bring that Zen Buddhist philosophy into a way of being or experiencing the Cairngorms. Which is so refreshing, and it’s important to have that perspective as an approach, it’s a brilliant balance."

"Nan Shepherd lived near Aberdeen [Scotland], and was a teacher. She travelled widely in her life, and she is probably best remembered as the author of three modernist novels that are acclaimed as part of the Scottish Renaissance of the early 20th century. But she was also a poet, largely unpublished, and an exceptional prose writer. She was very modest about her own abilities, and wrote very little after she finished those three novels in the late 1920s and early 1930s. But she was a passionate hill walker, and roamed and climbed widely over the Cairngorms, which are surely Britain’s greatest range. She spent her life walking “into them”, as she put it – not just up them, over them and around them. During the 1940s, Shepherd came to write The Living Mountain , a geo-philosophical meditation on the Cairngorm landscape in particular, but more generally on how mind and place “interpenetrate”, as she puts it. She was put off publishing it at the time by a friend, so she put it in a drawer and forgot about it. Three years before she died [in 1981] it was finally published by Aberdeen University Press. It became a cult book – passed from mountaineer to mountaineer. It never died, but it never flared. Then a new edition came out last summer, for which I wrote the introduction, and it is wonderful to see her remarkable book finding a new generation of readers. I know. I’m extremely aware that I have written an introduction which is getting on for half the length of the book itself, which must be close to a crime. The book itself is a beautifully spare and slender work, like The Peregrine . But my introduction is a labour of love, and an expression of my profound admiration for the book’s own mysteries. It is divided topographically, in the main. There’s a chapter called “The Plateau” and another called “The Recesses”, which is about the hollows, interiors, cracks and caves of the mountain landscape. Another is called “Air and Light”. So the book divides itself and does its thinking territorially – in that sense it emerges out of the mountain, as it were. In places it’s colloquial, and there are touches of memoir. There is some intense philosophical thinking which is done in action, as it were, through these beautiful stories of Nan’s experiences in blizzard and storm, or wading into the incredibly clear waters of the high lochs and rivers of the massif. Shepherd brings thought alive by showing it in action, and the whole book is dedicated to the idea that the mind and the body are together a complex thinking structure – that we don’t just think with our disembodied brain, but that touch, temperature, texture and motion are all part of cognition. It’s a sensual and, well, erotic text. Shepherd talks about “tasting the landscape”, and describes walking barefoot, sleeping out. It’s the record of a long-term and full-body immersion in a place. It’s certainly not a male preserve. Nan Shepherd, Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard – there’s a long list of outstanding writers about landscape who are women. But there is a strong trend towards male writing in the tradition, much of which is brought low by its own supposed heroism. Shepherd says something wonderfully chastening about being for years victim to “the lust of height”, wanting only to go to the summit. Then she recounts how she has learnt a modesty, and wishes only to go around and about on the mountain, “as a dog might”. Her book demonstrates a very modest instinct, and a very un-male aversion to the conquering impulse. That’s exactly right. By no means all male writers are like this, of course – Lopez is deeply humble and entirely uninterested in “challenge” as a mindset. If you look, by contrast, at the language of the 1953 Everest expedition, it’s filled with the language of siege and conquest – it was conceived as a paramilitary assault on the mountain. That couldn’t be further from Shepherd’s gentle, enquiring relationship with her Cairngorms."

"Yes. It’s an astonishing book. I first came across it by accident, in a tiny bookshop not long after it was first published in the late 1970s. It’s one of the books that are now regarded to be the finest in nature and landscape writing. It takes you right into the living heart of the Cairngorm Mountains. It’s a short, slim book, but it gives us more than most major books I’ve read on mountain landscapes and particularly the Cairngorms. It is spiritual, it’s emotional. There’s so much light in it. It dazzled me. And it still does when I re-read it, which I do often. One of the key aspects is that it transformed the way many modern writers now think of high places. We don’t look at them so much as things that should be conquered with grit and determination and muscle power—mainly male muscle power—but as somewhere where we can learn as much as anything else, about landscape and nature, about ourselves. That’s right. She uses the most interesting colour descriptors. There’s a section where she talks about the colour blue that reminds me of Rebecca Solnit’s essay on the blue of faraway places . Just thinking about it brings up goosebumps. I think it’s that sense of spiritual acuity, which a lot of writers don’t pick up on or are not able to express. But Nan Shepherd did, and that’s why it’s a book that so many people love. It gives us a completely different way of looking at mountains, beyond the tourist thinking, ‘goodness, look at that,’ or the mountaineer trying to bag all those Munros, they’ve got to climb this or that face of Ben Nevis with ropes in winter, whatever it is. Here she is, going solo in winter to the top of the Cairngorm plateau and describing the utter bone-flaying beauty of those high places. It’s a wonderful book."