Mountains of the Mind Quotes

“Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
― Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit

“As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a "continual agitation alive" in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear - this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist – as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“The true blessing of the mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels - whether it is the dark swirl which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees. Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on to one's outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. Tu put a hand down and feel the ridges and score in a rock where a glaciers has passed, to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid - none of these is a trivial experience. Mountains returns to us priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“This is the human paradox of altitude: that it both exalts the individual mind and erases it. Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“In the right frame of mind, to walk from one room in a house to another can be exploration of the highest order. To a child a back garden can be an unknown country.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen onto which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations. Like Echo's cave, the unknown will answer back with whatever you shout at it.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called ‘deep time’–the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years–crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer."
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"Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist–as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“Most of the world’s mountain ranges have been thrown up by the jostling and collision of the continental plates. Thus, for example, the Alps were created when the Adriatic Plate (which carries Italy on its back) was driven into the Eurasian Plate. The oldest mountains are those which are now the lowest, for erosion has had time to reduce them. The blunted, rubbed-down spine of the Urals, for instance, speaks of great age. So too do the rounded forms of the Scottish Cairngorms. Perhaps surprisingly, among the youngest mountains on earth are the Himalaya, which began to form only 65 million years ago, when the Indian Plate motored northwards and smashed slowly into the Eurasian Plate – ducking underneath it and then butting it five-and-a-half miles upwards into the air. Compared to the earth’s venerable ranges, the Himalaya are adolescents, with sharp, punkish ridges instead of the bald and worn-down pates of older ranges.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit

“Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the prrssures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transcience of the human body.
Yet there is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you exist, as unlikely as it may seem.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“Through the spectacles of geology, terra firms becomes terra mobilis, and we are forced to reconsider our beliefs of what is solid and what is not. Although we attribute to stone great power to hold back time, to refuse its claims (cairns, stone tablets, monuments, statuary), this is true only in relation to our own mutability. Looked at in the context of the bigger geological picture, rock is as vulnerable to change as any other substance.

Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“Maps do not take account of time, only of space.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“how to say what something is like, when it is like nothing that your reader has ever seen?”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“But then the glaciers were superb enigmas in an age which, beset my mechanization and materialism, was hungry for mysteries.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“Las montañas nos devuelven la capacidad impagable de maravillarnos, que la existencia moderna es capaz de marchitar sin la menor sensibilidad, y nos instan a aplicar esa capacidad a nuestra propia vida cotidiana.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“En el fondo, las montañas, como todo paisaje agreste, ponen en tela de juicio nuestra acomodaticia convicción —en la que tan fácilmente incurrimos— de que el mundo ha sido creado por y para el ser humano. Casi todos nosotros existimos la mayoría del tiempo en mundos dispuestos a la medida humana, compartimentados y controlados. Se nos olvida que existen entornos que no responden al arbitrio de un interruptor o al giro de un marcador telefónico, y que poseen su propio ritmo y orden de existencia. Las montañas corrigen esa amnesia. Hablándonos de fuerzas superiores a nuestras posibilidades de control y enfrentándonos a lapsos de tiempo superiores a los que somos capaces de imaginar, las montañas refutan el exceso de confianza que padecemos en lo hecho por la mano del hombre. Nos plantean cuestiones profundas sobre nuestra perdurabilidad y sobre la importancia de nuestras ideas. Nos inducen, supongo, a la modestia.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“En el fondo, las montañas, como todo paisaje agreste, ponen en tela de juicio nuestra acomodaticia convicción —en la que tan fácilmente incurrimos— de que el mundo ha sido creado por y para el ser humano.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“Las cartas que Mallory le mandaba siguen llegando durante semanas…, misivas de los muertos.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“Entonces, con un último esfuerzo, se golpea el pecho con el puño y, al mismo tiempo, tose tan fuerte como puede. El objeto se despega y le salta hasta la boca. Lo escupe en la nieve. Es un fragmento de laringe, muerta por congelación.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“Recuerda que la palabra malaya para agua es «aire» y, en el trópico, esa aparente confusión cobra pleno sentido.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“Geológicamente hablando, fue la colisión de la India con el Tíbet lo que creó el Himalaya. Y, en el siglo XIX, fue la colisión del Imperio británico, en plena expansión hacia el norte, con el Imperio ruso, en plena expansión hacia el este, lo que creó el Himalaya en la imaginación occidental.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“A primera vista, la nieve parece simplificar el paisaje, suavizar las irregularidades. Las piedras se convierten en esferas, los árboles en agujas, las cimas de las montañas en conos. El paisaje se reviste de una sencilla belleza euclidiana, y de unidad.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“He visto un espectro del Brocken solo en una ocasión, en la isla de Skye. Iba caminando por la cresta de unos elegantes montes que se extendían de norte a sur. El sol de la mañana me bañaba desde el este y, de pronto, vi mi sombra proyectada en la húmeda bruma que había por debajo de mí, rodeada de un nimbo multicolor. Parecía un genio cortés que viajara en una alfombra mágica de niebla manteniendo siempre las distancias conmigo.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“La luz en la montaña es espectacular. Además, conspira con otros elementos para llegar a ser engañosa, cuando produce espejismos, por ejemplo, u otros efectos luminosos. En los neveros y glaciares, la uniformidad de la textura del paisaje distorsiona la perspectiva espacial normal. Es difícil calcular distancias.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“Llama la atención, en particular, el amor por la piedra y la roca. En los diarios de viaje se hace hincapié una y otra vez en los curiosos afloramientos rocosos, como arcos, cuevas, estalactitas y pináculos, o en rocas que parecen leones, obispos, «cabezas de moro», cañones, camellos…”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“«La Providencia —declaró el abad Pluche, uno de los principales teóricos de la teología natural— ha hecho el aire invisible para permitirnos contemplar el espectáculo de la naturaleza.»”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“Wilson era natural de Yorkshire, comerciante de profesión y loco a la edad de treinta años.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“Se creía que las laderas más altas de las montañas estaban pobladas de gamuzas gigantes, trolls, diablos, dragones, banshees y otros seres siniestros y fabulosos, mientras que las divinidades habitaban en las cimas. John”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación

“A pesar de todo, en cierto modo lo desconocido no existe, porque adondequiera que vamos, llevamos con nosotros nuestro propio mundo.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Las montañas de la mente: Historia de una fascinación