The Living Mountain
Last week I read a book that has been on my shelf for a while, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, and on Saturday Robert Macfarlane kicked off his latest Twitter book club (I had previously joined in the one on W.G. Sebald’s strange masterpiece The Rings of Saturn, which for me is one of the great books of the twentieth century). The spirit in such clubs is the best of Twitter - sharing, connecting, enthusing - but the spirit right now is of course heightened immeasurably as people join in from all over the world. Check out the hashtag #CoReadingVirus, including many wonderful photographs.
In Robert Macfarlane’s wise and beautiful words:
These are hard, hard times. Worries breed, demons circle, fear rises. The going is tough. There are drops at every turn. I hope this group, gathered in neither defiance nor denial of our current context, is helping a little. I know it's helping me. For which, thanks.
The Living Mountain is perfect for ‘our situation’. Bracing, precise, deep, it is an act of witness of someone who knows a place deeply, though as Shepherd writes this doesn’t mean she understands it. Her prose is as crisp as the mountain water she writes about brilliantly in Chapter 4. In his introduction to the Canongate edition, Macfarlane rightly connects her with the great Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, for whom the parish was not a perimeter but an aperture … the idea that we learn by scrutiny of the close-at-hand. I think of his poem ‘Epic’ (1960).
The other poet I think of is Elizabeth Bishop. Each writer searches relentlessly for the truth in what she observes, and the language with which to describe this exactly. A section close to the start of Chapter 3 tries to hunt down the truth about wetness / rain / cloud. In Chapter 4, ‘Water’, she writes that
any child in school can understand it … water rises in the hills, it flows and finds its own level, and man can’t live without it. But I don’t understand it. I cannot fathom its power.
This seems to be at the heart of it: she knows the place intimately, but refuses to allow that she ‘understands’ it. And of course she reminds me of another great writer of attention to the natural world, Gerald Manley Hopkins (she quotes ‘Inversnaid’ in Chapter 4).
Some sentences and phrases that struck me, with more to come as the club progresses [Canongate pagination]-
the very first: Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge (1). What a start.
a young hillman: What he values is a task that, demanding of him all he has and is, absorbs and so releases him entirely (6). A sentence for our times.
In Chapter 2: This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality (10) and later Nothing has reference to me, the looker (11). The humility of this: she does not assume she is the subject (in Chapter 8, she writes of the birds, they are not in the books for me). Just after this she states that she began to understand that haste can do nothing with these hills. I knew that when I had looked for a long time that I had hardly begun to see (11). Looking is a long way from ‘seeing’, from understanding.
For attentive observation the body must be still (13). Again, observation, attention.
In the remarkable Chapter 4 (‘Water’), a phrase: the churr of ptarmigan (24) - wonderful.
Colours: like Elizabeth Bishop in ‘The Fish’, she tries to get these just right: The greenness of the water varies according to the light, now aquamarine, now verdigris, but it is always pure green, metallic rather than vegetable (25).
Chapter 5: In paw depressions may be a delicate tracery of frost (31). Delicate tracery in itself, that sentence.
An amazing long paragraph in Chapter 5 starting But while birds and tracks… (31-2) includes this sentence, à la Hopkins: The ice may be crystal clear, but more probably is translucent; crimped, cracked or bubbled; green throughout or at the edges.
Also in that paragraph: I have seen icicles like a scimitar blade in shape, firm and solid in their place (32).
32: When the ice-paws crisped round the stones in the burns, and the ice-carrots that hang from the ledges, are loosened, and the freed ice floats down the river, it looks like masses of floating water lilies, or bunching cauliflower heads.
Chapter 5. The stories of the ‘boys’ who died on the mountains in blizzards are very poignant. Detail: The schoolmistress… told me of that wind, that her crippled sister, crossing the open space of the playground, was blown from her feet (39).
Chapter 6 is again about seeing and looking, knowing and understanding. An important paragraph late in it: Walking in the dark, oddly enough, can reveal new knowledge about a familiar place (46). She is amazed to find out how unfamiliar she is with a familiar path: my memory was so much in the eye and so little in the feet (46). At any moment you can see something differently that you see all the time (in fact, if you see it all the time, you are more likely to be visited by such moments).
A key sentence, at the start of Chapter 7: All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain (48). ‘All’ here means the living things: the rain, seed, bird, flowers. As well expect the eyelid to function if cut from the eye.
Despite the terrible blasting winds on the plateau, over 20 species of plant grow there, and the tenacity of life (49) can be seen also on the lower shoulders where the heather has been burnt. What follows is a brilliant section on the life sprouting from the seeds. Nowhere more than here is life proved invincible. Again, I think of Hopkins in a different context in ‘God’s Grandeur’: And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.
Further into Chapter 7, her writing on scents is gorgeous: sensuousness sliding into sensuality.
A friend refers to walking over the ling in a hot sun, preferably not on a path: I like the unpath best (51).
Chapter 7 ends with learning and knowledge. I was learning my way in, through my own fingers, to the secret of growth. That secret the mountain never quite gives away. Man is slowly learning to read it, she writes (58), and Knowledge does not dispel mystery (59). This paradox drives the book: she knows the mountains so well, but never completely. The more we know, the more we realise the limits of our knowledge.
In Chapter 8, back to the (wonderfully named) ptarmigan: In startled flight, his wing-beats are so rapid that the white wings lose all appearance of solidity, they are like an aura of light around the body (66).
I have come upon a small squirrel the size of a well-grown mouse, on the ground under fir trees, scampering from cone to cone, picking up each in turn, scrutinising, sampling, tossing it away, with a sort of wilful petulance in his movements such as I have seen in small children who have too many toys (73). And the rest of that paragraph: a model to show young writers.
Daytime sleep on the mountain: falling asleep has the delicious corollary of awaking (91).
The tiny crested tit: showing himself about, now back, now front, now side, keeping each pose for a moment before flirting to a new one on a higher or a lower trig. A finished mannequin (95).
At the end (108), I began to discover the mountain in itself … This process has taken many years, and is not yet complete. Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing.