In 1944, the 51-year-old Nan Shepherd, coming off an unhappy love affair, turned her attention to the manuscript that would become “The Living Mountain,” a book about Scotland’s Cairngorm mountain range, which she had been climbing since childhood.
Shepherd was already a known author, having written three modernist novels and a poetry collection, “In the Cairngorms.” But by the time she wrote “The Living Mountain” — a work that has always been prefaced with the warning that it defies easy categorization, but has also been called “the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in Britain” — she had not published anything in a decade. Her quotidian life was lecturing at a college in Aberdeen, close to where she was born, and the travel and mountaineering a teacher’s schedule enables.
When Shepherd showed her manuscript to a fellow writer, Neil M. Gunn, he was enthusiastic but cautious, suggesting some maps to anchor the reader, and a glossary of Scottish terms. (She would add the latter.) But after an unenthusiastic response from her publisher, Shepherd shoved “The Living Mountain” into the proverbial drawer and didn’t take it out until 1977, when it was published in a limited edition by Aberdeen University Press. She died in 1981.
I can only assume that THE LIVING MOUNTAIN (Scribner, 123 pp., paperback, $18), out in a new edition this year, has had a cult following from the moment it appeared. But it was in 2011, when it was reprinted in Britain with an introduction by the nature and travel writer Robert Macfarlane, that its reputation began to grow.
What to call it, asks Macfarlane: “A celebratory prose poem? A geo-poetic quest? A place-paean? A philosophical inquiry into the nature of knowledge? A metaphysical mash-up of Presbyterianism and the Tao?” As he concludes, it is all of this and more; Shepherd herself called it “a traffic in love.”
I myself came to “The Living Mountain” in 2018, after a tour of the Alpine Club in London. The guide showed us Lord Mallory’s diaries and some crampons that belonged to Graham Greene’s brother. We heard of bodies leaping out of crevasses, of doomed and triumphant expeditions — and of Nan Shepherd.
I picked up a copy of her book that same day, but I must admit that I regarded the slim volume with a certain apprehension. I am … not a mountain climber. I have never known the existential terror of a whiteout or the ecstasies of sustained altitude or the land-sickness of the true alpinist. While my family did a good bit of thrifty car-camping in my childhood, I was never very good at it. Tent-rigging, fire-building, hiking — these are things that getting older renders blessedly optional, because what is adulthood if not a chance to construct a world that disguises your weaknesses?
Much though I admired intrepid outdoor writers like Bruce Chatwin and John Muir and Peter Matthiessen, the feeble, nearsighted kid in me found them alienating in their steely rigor, suggestive as they were of characters molded by instructive austerity, of keen gazes unaided by the optician’s arts.
I will not do Shepherd the disservice of saying she was more approachable to me simply because she is a woman — although, as Macfarlane observes, she was less summit-obsessed than many of her male counterparts. But the mountains were in her blood; she was as tough and as up for (in her words) “toil” as anyone.
Part of Shepherd’s appeal is that she is a teacher to her bones; I can recognize the ptarmigan’s plumage and the petals of St. John’s wort from her descriptions, without the aid of a single image. I can feel the unsparing elements:
Cold spring water stings the palate, the throat tingles unbearably; cold air smacks the back of the mouth, the lungs crackle. Wind blows a nostril in, one breathes on one side only, the cheek is flattened against the gum, the breath comes gaspingly, as in a fish taken from water — man is not in his element in air that moves at this velocity.
The smell of sawed pine is “like strawberry jam on the boil, but with a tang that tautens the membranes of nose and throat.” The Cairngorm water is “green like the green of winter skies, but lucent, clear like aquamarines, without the vivid brilliance of glacier water.” A cloud is “wet but not wetting.” Much of the book is frankly ecstatic; she is, by her own account, “a part-time mystic.”
Yet Shepherd’s world is explicitly corporeal, and her mountain more friend than god: “Life up here is full of loves, hates, jealousies, tendernesses, loyalties and betrayals, like anywhere else, and a great deal of plain humdrum happiness.”
Indeed, she is not always alone. The mountains are peopled with guides, trail keepers and fellow travelers, as well as those who have died on their treks when the weather turned. Of these unfortunate souls, Shepherd writes: “They committed, I suppose, an error of judgment, but I cannot judge them. For it is the risk we must all take when we accept individual responsibility for ourselves on the mountain, and until we have done that, we do not begin to know it.”
This is, I think, what I most love about this book. The knowing and not judging. The knowing and not knowing. “The more one learns of this intricate tissue of soil, altitude, weather and the living tissues of plant and insect,” she writes, “the more the mystery deepens.”
One beauty of “The Living Mountain” is its adaptability, the way it challenges us to find comparison, to claim Shepherd for our own, whether as a prophet of environmentalism or as a forerunner of theories of the body-subject. (As Macfarlane astutely points out, Shepherd’s 1944 manuscript predates Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “The Phenomenology of Perception” by a year.)
I see in Shepherd a valuable guide through even the most urban of journeys. I choose to believe that she would not despise those of us made of softer stuff, so long as we can learn to see.
Recently, I listened to “The Living Mountain” on audiobook. And as I walked around the grubby streets of New York, or sat on the subway, surrounded by so many people and so little nature, the contrast did not feel grotesque. I was especially struck, this time, by her express dislike of describing the mountain in magical terms:
It interposes something artificial between the world, which is one reality, and the self, which is another reality, though overlaid with a good many crusts of falseness and convention. And it is the fusion of these two realities that keeps life from corruption.
I was walking by the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and these words felt as true as if I’d been peering at a stag on the edge of a misty ravine.
Some books, one recommends to everyone. As much as I love it, however often I have wanted to share passages and communicate its serenity, I have not, until now, pushed “The Living Mountain” on very many people. Because it is not for everyone. It takes attention; it takes patience; one must be in the right frame of mind, ready to surrender.
After all, to be in the wild, alone, is to step away not just from comforts and routine, but from all the signifiers we labor over in our urban lives. It can be alarming. But in a world of self-help, this is true inspiration, deeply admirable without the distance of heroism, bracing without stridency and, ultimately, generous. The mountain, Shepherd tells us, is “a corrective of glib assessment.” So is its book.
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