The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (The Grampian Quartet Book 4)

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There is no doubt that The Living Mountain is a nice bit of writing and there were moments when I felt transported to the Cairngorms and into Shepherd's inner most musings on nature. a b c Ali Smith, "Shepherd, Anna (1893–1981)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, Retrieved 22 December 2013. Out of this awareness arises an enlargement of both the mind and the senses, of the very self, beyond the body and yet intensely of the body: As opposed to lyrical I found the prose far too literal. As opposed to poetic I found it sometimes nudging prosaic.

In a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher Simone Weil’s assertion that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” Shepherd considers how an attentive and benevolent curiosity about this living mountain — about anything beyond oneself, indeed — effects a generous enlargement of both self and other: Shepherd was a major contributor to early Scottish Modernist literature. Her first novel, The Quarry Wood (1928) has often been compared to Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, published four years later, as they both portray restricted, often tragic lives of women in Scotland at that time. [6] Her second novel, The Weatherhouse (1930), concerns interactions between people in a small Scottish community. [7] Her third and final novel, A Pass in the Grampians, appeared in 1933. [4]Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them. Just as Rachel Carson was preparing to sound her courageous clarion call for protecting nature from political and commercial exploitation across the Atlantic, Shepherd adds a cautionary lamentation: Heel fijn onthaastend boek om te lezen, prachtig geschreven vol liefde voor de bergen van de Cairngorms, waar ze in een dorpje aan de voet ervan, haar hele leven heeft gewoond. Zo subtiel in al haar waarnemingen, heel herkenbaar, het brengt al die keren in mijn leven dat ik liep in de Schotse bergen terug. Het is er zó mooi!

Step by step she also shows how for her the mountains have an inner, almost a soul, which also influences everything that lives on it or walks on it. Of course, she doesn't mean this religiously, but it comes very close to it. She explicitly refers to Taoism and Buddhism and the way in which interaction between human physicality (being in the body) and seemingly 'lifeless' matter is nevertheless possible. Amazing how subtle she does this, without falling into New Age-like or esoteric grumbling. It reminded me very much of Gregory Bateson and his intuition about everything being pervaded by 'mind'.

It's become increasingly rare to have an intimate and lasting relationship with a wild space. If you have one, I think you will identify with many of Shepherd's experiences; if you don't, perhaps this book will provide the impetus to get out there and find your own living mountain (or dune, or forest, or whatever). Nan Shepherd | Justin Marozzi | Slightly Foxed literary review". Slightly Foxed. 1 December 2018 . Retrieved 24 November 2019. Everyone in Scotland knows what Nan Shepherd looks like. Her face, complete with bejewelled bandanna, stares out from the Scottish five-pound note. Yet how people many have read her books? Shepherd’s book records – with luminous precision – details of the Cairngorm world: ‘the coil over coil’ of a golden eagle’s ascent on a thermal, a pool of ‘small frogs jumping like tiddly-winks’, a white hare crossing sunlit snow with its accompanying ‘odd ludicrous leggy shadow-skeleton’. The inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power. Silence belongs to it. If jeeps find it out, or a funicular railway disfigures it, part of its meaning will be gone. The good of the greatest number is not here relevant. It is necessary to be sometimes exclusive, not on behalf of rank or wealth, but of those human qualities that can apprehend loneliness.

And some, most movingly, related to the experience of being human and fully engaged in a living landscape: That is not to say that you, whomever is reading this review, would feel the same way. You, who is an individual in your own right, who sees nature in your unique way and who reacts to prose work with distinctly differing reflections. This focus on The Living Mountain tends to obscure the creative achievement of Shepherd’s three novels, The Quarry Wood (1928), The Weatherhouse (1930) and A Pass in the Grampians (1933), with their attention to rural communities under pressure from modernity. In 2009 – inspired in part by another classic of place-literature, J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967) – I made a Natural World film for BBC2 called The Wild Places of Essex, which sought to find and celebrate the remarkable ‘modern nature’ of that much-maligned county.This slim book of essays is an account of Nan Shepherd's lifelong explorations of the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. The Living Mountain is not a memoir (we learn little about Nan Shepherd beyond who she is when she's in the Cairngorms). Nor is it an adventure story filled with triumph and camaraderie and testosterone. It is perhaps described best as a love story between one person and a place.