The Living Mountain

I came late to this book, which was written in the 1940’s, and not published for the first time, until 1977, but it instantly became one of my all-time favourites, and the one I would take to a desert island should the occasion arise. It’s an astonishing piece of writing that runs counter to everything in our contemporary fast-paced, consumer-driven society. Nan Shepherd is writing about a single mountain, with a depth of knowledge that seems unavailable now that tourism has become a massive part of our economy, and there is no far-flung place on the planet that some celebrity… show more.

I’ve never read anything like The Living Mountain. A book that is, at once, an autobiography of a remarkable yet under-celebrated woman writer and an exploration of the ecstasies of experiencing the world through the body and its senses.

In gorgeously vivid prose, Shepherd invites us to pursue depth over breadth and to rely upon our felt experience as a way of knowing in the world. This book challenges dominant “hero’s journey” narratives in both content and form and suggests that all we yearn to experience and know can be found right where we find ourselves, wherever that may… show more.

If you want to get in touch with nature and are looking for a how-to book, not so much a prescription, but an experiential meditation, then look no further because Nan Shepherd is your gal, and her book, The Living Mountain, is your book.

Shepherd went about writing The Living Mountain in the 1940s by analyzing her fifty years of walkabouts and then synthesizing her experience into twelve chapters that move from hardscapes into the biosphere. The last few chapters are meditations on perception, the last entitled “Being.”

Ultimately, this book is a meditation on what Shepherd calls “bodily thinking,”… show more.

I’m rather ashamed that I didn’t know about it before and only came to it after reading a recommendation by Robert Macfarlane. I began by reading it in bed but had to stop almost immediately as it was never going to help send me to sleep.

Her use of language when evoking the Cairngorms is utterly extraordinary, and any attempt to sum it up would be, to use one of her phrases, a pallid simulacrum.

Crafted by a remarkable novelist and poet, it may well be, as it’s often described, “the finest book ever written on nature and landscape in… show more.

For a devotee of mountaineering books, this one holds a special place in the canon. Whereas other narratives might accentuate the numbers or other data of the climb, this one emphasizes the author's internal, subjective experience of sublimity in nature. This pilgrim loves—but I mean deeply and faithfully respects, reveres, and revisits—the mountain range that is just outside her home village. Nan Shepherd was a native of Aberdeen, Scotland (1893-1981) who made a living teaching English but whose true vocation was to be on top of the Cairngorms. Just to be, not to prove anything. I've not found an explorer… show more.

"The thing to be known grows with the knowing." This slim book is the distillation of a whole lifetime spent knowing the Cairngorms. Every page is radiant with wisdom, and I think it’s close to perfection. A book all about matter and spirit, and how paying close attention to creation is an endlessly rich and rewarding devotion. 

To my mind the finest meditation on the experience of walking among the hills, looking inward and out. Written in the Forties, this short book is at once timeless and decades ahead of its time. It is profoundly philosophical yet utterly rooted in experience - environmental, ecological, spiritual, the product of many years of wandering and musing in the Cairngorms. Hauntingly lovely and true, without ever being inflated or sentimental, it goes to the heart of our being, and the mountains’ being. I had the pleasure and privilege of recommending this long out-of-print book to Canongate for its series of… show more.