Mountains of the Mind

"I think he’s one of our great ‘new nature writers’, who are the people writing contemporarily about the environment. It’s difficult to say what it’s about in a few sentences but I think what he’s really getting at is just the idea that to be in high and dangerous places is a beautiful and exciting experience. He used to be a climber, although he doesn’t climb any more, and in the book he is interested in what makes people do this highly dangerous thing. It also has a lot of cultural history about mountains, about the various ways different people have felt about them. It’s a really clever book, which asks questions such as why we like the wild, why we think we like the wild, would we like it if we weren’t so civilised? Epic environments do seem to have something to do with it. I mean we talked about the desert hermits earlier. Later, following that tradition, Irish monks got into tiny boats and travelled everywhere, including North America. The idea was to seek out these really wild places. There is a very strong connection between wilderness and solitude and silence, and you get a sense of that when Macfarlane describes some of his mountaineering experiences. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think a great deal of contemporary society has a very unhealthy relationship with silence. The relationship is one of terror. People are terrified of silence, which I expect is because they are terrified of death. We don’t know much about death, but we know absolutely that it ain’t chatty. I think that something which is a simple pleasure and a human necessity becomes, in light of our fear of death, something quite manic. We make increasing amounts of noise as a society. There is music playing everywhere, and even the length of time a radio pause can be has been shortened on the BBC because people don’t like it. We have a high intolerance of silence, but we really can carry on without a mobile phone: I know because I haven’t got one. Personally, and I’m not everybody obviously, I think that not to be able to be silent and alone is quite dangerous and damaging. There is a great loss with children particularly, because of the close relationship between silence and creativity."