.
“I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand,
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook's,
Going to get a big dish of beef chow mein.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“If you hear him howling around your kitchen door,
Better not let him in.
Little old lady got mutilated late last night,
Werewolves of London again.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
“He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent,
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair.
Better stay away from him,
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim.
I'd like to meet his tailor.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London.
Ahooww-Ooooh!
.
Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw Lon Chaney, Jr. walking with the Queen,
Doing the werewolves of London.
I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's,
His hair was perfect.
Werewolves of London again.
Draw blood.
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh! …
Ahooww-Ooooh! Werewolves of London
Ahooww-Ooooh!”
.
-(Music and Lyrics by Warren Zevon)-
*
[This song was the radio song-of-the-week in May 1978 when I did a solo rock climb of Fritz Wiessner’s “Old Route” on the Upper Washbowl Ledge, Chapel Pond, Adirondacks, NY. It was a great high point in my early climbing development. High, wild, and throwing out all restraints. My theme song of that day. Ooh Rah! –Zenwind.]
.
31 October 2010
14 October 2010
Book Review: Mountains of the Mind: a history of a fascination, by Robert Macfarlane (2003)
.
Robert Macfarlane can really write. As expressed in its subtitle, Mountains of the Mind is a sort of history of the human fascination with mountains – and more. It is part history, part geography lesson and part literary survey, and there are great bits of lore on almost every page. He chronicles the changing ideas about mountains that led to people actually climbing them. He also intersperses the text with some of his own personal experiences in the mountains, which are eloquently written.
.
The first chapter is named “Possession,” and that says it all. Mountains do possess some of us. From his own youth, reading through his grandfather’s books, Macfarlane has been possessed, i.e., obsessed. The gory details of injury and death in the mountains are part of its romance. It is a familiar path: one reads the thrilling, and often tragic, stories of great mountaineers and expeditioners of the past and one gets caught up in the quest. Alpinists have often been very literate, and their writings are usually impossible to put down.
.
There is the great 1924 mystery of Mallory and Irvine, who were last seen climbing ever upward on a high ridge of Mt. Everest before the clouds obscured them from below. There are books on the great polar expeditions. There is John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest (a personal milestone in my own young adventure reading), telling of the 1953 ascent by Hillary and Tenzing. There is Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps, with graphic illustrations by Whymper. Then there is Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna.
.
Herzog’s account of the French 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first-ever ascent of any Himalayan peak over 8,000 meters, is a mountaineering classic that possessed me as it did Macfarlane. It was a tipping point into obsession for both of us. Herzog and Louis Lachenal set off on a cold, clear morning from the highest camp for Annapurna’s summit. As Macfarlane paraphrases, “Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. They carried on.” (p.7) Herzog lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite, but they reached the summit and lived to tell about it. (My own 1976 experience – see “The Frostbite Trip” – was a painful one of freezing my toes and thinking I would die, but still carrying on and up, a decision I have never regretted.)
.
Chapter Two is “The Great Stone Book” and tells of Europeans first treating mountains as objects worthy of study, with the new science of geology slowly giving birth to concepts of “deep time.” The early geologist, Scotsman James Hutton, ended his Theory of the Earth (late 1790s) with this: “The result therefore of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – and no prospect of an end.” This was a mind-stretching concept, and the Romantic poets and painters became possessed by mountains and wilderness.
.
Chapter Three is “The Pursuit of Fear” and discusses attitudes toward risk, death, the 1865 Matterhorn disaster, etc. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a recklessly addictive personality, took up what he called “a new sort of Gambling” – addiction to heights. He would climb a rocky peak and then pick a blindly arbitrary descent route, knowing that down-climbing is much harder than ascent. In 1802 he found himself stuck on a ledge in England’s Peak District with a storm coming in. He obviously lived to tell of it, but he was lucky.
.
The great English climber Alfred Mummery was an early advocate of solo climbing, and he died in 1895 in one of the first attempts to climb an 8,000 meter peak, Nanga Parbat, with a small climbing party. Nietzsche wrote of the “discipline of suffering – of great suffering” being what has “produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto,” and that “This hardness is requisite for every mountain-climber.”
.
In 1865 the Matterhorn was first ascended by Edward Whymper in a party of seven, several of whom should not have been on the hill. All seven were tied into one hemp rope, the common practice at that time. Descending after victory, the most inexperienced man slipped and dragged down three others, and these four fell thousands of feet down the North Face. Killed were a young English lord, a preacher, a Cambridge student and a Swiss guide. Whymper and two others only lived because the rope broke. The reaction in England was hysteric, with outcries that mountaineering was lunacy and “a depraved taste.” Maybe so, but we climb.
.
Chapter Four is “Glaciers and Ice: the streams of time.” Geology came to the idea of a great Ice Age in the past, of a once-frozen Earth as well as a possibility of a return in the future of “icy death.” 1816 was “the year without a summer,” a disastrous cold spell caused by volcanic ash in the atmosphere, and it caused poets such as Byron and Shelley to contemplate this with dread. Later, the wider spread of the idea of ice ages changed not only science but the popular way of looking at landscapes.
.
(My hometown in northern Pennsylvania has a classic U-shaped valley cutting through the hills to the south, caused by huge glaciers of the last ice sheet advancing overhead. I pointed this out and explained it to my Thai wife – who had never until that April been out of the Tropics – and she laughed at me, convinced that I was telling an outrageous jest. I did not press the issue since it was not a concept that she would easily assimilate, and, after all, it really is a mind-blower.)
.
Chapter Five is “Altitude: the summit and the view.” In 1786 Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, was climbed by two Frenchmen, Paccard and Balmat. By the end of the Eighteenth century, Macfarlane writes, “Summit fever was catching.”
.
In 1818 the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer Above a Sea of Clouds. Macfarlane writes that this Friedrich painting “became, and has remained, the archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary, a figure ubiquitous in Romantic art.” He continues, saying that “…as a crystallization of a concept – that standing atop a mountain is to be admired, that it confers nobility on a person – Friedrich’s painting has carried enormous symbolic power down the years in terms of Western self-perception.” (p.157)
.
For artists and poets of that day, such as Friedrich, Keats and Shelley, “[altitude] coincided perfectly with the Romantic glorification of the individual. … The mountain-top also provided an icon for the Romantic ideal of liberty: what could more obviously embody freedom and openness?” (pp.158-9). Height now “equaled escape, it equaled solitude, it equaled spiritual and artistic epiphany.” (p.160)
.
Chapter Six is called “Walking Off the Map,” and it recounts the joys and rigors of exploring new mountain ranges. It makes me want to put on my boots and go.
.
Chapter Seven is “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” Macfarlane mentions an experience that I have often had: of returning to the lowland civilization after being awhile in the mountains and finding it to be a disorienting episode, solitary and incommunicable. One feels like an exile returning home after long years abroad, “bearing experiences beyond speech.” (p.204)
.
Chapter Eight is “Everest,” and tells of George Mallory’s fatal obsession with that mountain through his letters and other writings. (“Why?” “Because it’s there.”)
.
Chapter Nine is a short final chapter, “The Snow Hare,” and it sums up many of the threads earlier in the book. Macfarlane tells of meeting a snow hare briefly on a winter mountaintop in Scotland in a completely blinding snowstorm. This solitary encounter, a crossing of paths, sums up for him the feeling of “wonder” found on mountains.
.
“The solitude I had [earlier] experienced in the whiteout on the ridge had been replaced by a sense of distance invisibly before me. I no longer felt cocooned by the falling snow, I felt accommodated by it, extended by it – part of the hundreds of miles of landscape over which the snow was falling. … I thought of the snow falling across ridge on ridge of the invisible hills, and I thought too that there was nowhere at that moment I would rather be.” (p.278)
.
I have never been on that specific mountain, but I know exactly what he means.
.
-Zenwind.
.
Robert Macfarlane can really write. As expressed in its subtitle, Mountains of the Mind is a sort of history of the human fascination with mountains – and more. It is part history, part geography lesson and part literary survey, and there are great bits of lore on almost every page. He chronicles the changing ideas about mountains that led to people actually climbing them. He also intersperses the text with some of his own personal experiences in the mountains, which are eloquently written.
.
The first chapter is named “Possession,” and that says it all. Mountains do possess some of us. From his own youth, reading through his grandfather’s books, Macfarlane has been possessed, i.e., obsessed. The gory details of injury and death in the mountains are part of its romance. It is a familiar path: one reads the thrilling, and often tragic, stories of great mountaineers and expeditioners of the past and one gets caught up in the quest. Alpinists have often been very literate, and their writings are usually impossible to put down.
.
There is the great 1924 mystery of Mallory and Irvine, who were last seen climbing ever upward on a high ridge of Mt. Everest before the clouds obscured them from below. There are books on the great polar expeditions. There is John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest (a personal milestone in my own young adventure reading), telling of the 1953 ascent by Hillary and Tenzing. There is Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps, with graphic illustrations by Whymper. Then there is Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna.
.
Herzog’s account of the French 1950 ascent of Annapurna, the first-ever ascent of any Himalayan peak over 8,000 meters, is a mountaineering classic that possessed me as it did Macfarlane. It was a tipping point into obsession for both of us. Herzog and Louis Lachenal set off on a cold, clear morning from the highest camp for Annapurna’s summit. As Macfarlane paraphrases, “Quite soon it became apparent that they would have to turn back or run the risk of severe frostbite. They carried on.” (p.7) Herzog lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite, but they reached the summit and lived to tell about it. (My own 1976 experience – see “The Frostbite Trip” – was a painful one of freezing my toes and thinking I would die, but still carrying on and up, a decision I have never regretted.)
.
Chapter Two is “The Great Stone Book” and tells of Europeans first treating mountains as objects worthy of study, with the new science of geology slowly giving birth to concepts of “deep time.” The early geologist, Scotsman James Hutton, ended his Theory of the Earth (late 1790s) with this: “The result therefore of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning, – and no prospect of an end.” This was a mind-stretching concept, and the Romantic poets and painters became possessed by mountains and wilderness.
.
Chapter Three is “The Pursuit of Fear” and discusses attitudes toward risk, death, the 1865 Matterhorn disaster, etc. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a recklessly addictive personality, took up what he called “a new sort of Gambling” – addiction to heights. He would climb a rocky peak and then pick a blindly arbitrary descent route, knowing that down-climbing is much harder than ascent. In 1802 he found himself stuck on a ledge in England’s Peak District with a storm coming in. He obviously lived to tell of it, but he was lucky.
.
The great English climber Alfred Mummery was an early advocate of solo climbing, and he died in 1895 in one of the first attempts to climb an 8,000 meter peak, Nanga Parbat, with a small climbing party. Nietzsche wrote of the “discipline of suffering – of great suffering” being what has “produced all the elevation of humanity hitherto,” and that “This hardness is requisite for every mountain-climber.”
.
In 1865 the Matterhorn was first ascended by Edward Whymper in a party of seven, several of whom should not have been on the hill. All seven were tied into one hemp rope, the common practice at that time. Descending after victory, the most inexperienced man slipped and dragged down three others, and these four fell thousands of feet down the North Face. Killed were a young English lord, a preacher, a Cambridge student and a Swiss guide. Whymper and two others only lived because the rope broke. The reaction in England was hysteric, with outcries that mountaineering was lunacy and “a depraved taste.” Maybe so, but we climb.
.
Chapter Four is “Glaciers and Ice: the streams of time.” Geology came to the idea of a great Ice Age in the past, of a once-frozen Earth as well as a possibility of a return in the future of “icy death.” 1816 was “the year without a summer,” a disastrous cold spell caused by volcanic ash in the atmosphere, and it caused poets such as Byron and Shelley to contemplate this with dread. Later, the wider spread of the idea of ice ages changed not only science but the popular way of looking at landscapes.
.
(My hometown in northern Pennsylvania has a classic U-shaped valley cutting through the hills to the south, caused by huge glaciers of the last ice sheet advancing overhead. I pointed this out and explained it to my Thai wife – who had never until that April been out of the Tropics – and she laughed at me, convinced that I was telling an outrageous jest. I did not press the issue since it was not a concept that she would easily assimilate, and, after all, it really is a mind-blower.)
.
Chapter Five is “Altitude: the summit and the view.” In 1786 Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, was climbed by two Frenchmen, Paccard and Balmat. By the end of the Eighteenth century, Macfarlane writes, “Summit fever was catching.”
.
In 1818 the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer Above a Sea of Clouds. Macfarlane writes that this Friedrich painting “became, and has remained, the archetypical image of the mountain-climbing visionary, a figure ubiquitous in Romantic art.” He continues, saying that “…as a crystallization of a concept – that standing atop a mountain is to be admired, that it confers nobility on a person – Friedrich’s painting has carried enormous symbolic power down the years in terms of Western self-perception.” (p.157)
.
For artists and poets of that day, such as Friedrich, Keats and Shelley, “[altitude] coincided perfectly with the Romantic glorification of the individual. … The mountain-top also provided an icon for the Romantic ideal of liberty: what could more obviously embody freedom and openness?” (pp.158-9). Height now “equaled escape, it equaled solitude, it equaled spiritual and artistic epiphany.” (p.160)
.
Chapter Six is called “Walking Off the Map,” and it recounts the joys and rigors of exploring new mountain ranges. It makes me want to put on my boots and go.
.
Chapter Seven is “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” Macfarlane mentions an experience that I have often had: of returning to the lowland civilization after being awhile in the mountains and finding it to be a disorienting episode, solitary and incommunicable. One feels like an exile returning home after long years abroad, “bearing experiences beyond speech.” (p.204)
.
Chapter Eight is “Everest,” and tells of George Mallory’s fatal obsession with that mountain through his letters and other writings. (“Why?” “Because it’s there.”)
.
Chapter Nine is a short final chapter, “The Snow Hare,” and it sums up many of the threads earlier in the book. Macfarlane tells of meeting a snow hare briefly on a winter mountaintop in Scotland in a completely blinding snowstorm. This solitary encounter, a crossing of paths, sums up for him the feeling of “wonder” found on mountains.
.
“The solitude I had [earlier] experienced in the whiteout on the ridge had been replaced by a sense of distance invisibly before me. I no longer felt cocooned by the falling snow, I felt accommodated by it, extended by it – part of the hundreds of miles of landscape over which the snow was falling. … I thought of the snow falling across ridge on ridge of the invisible hills, and I thought too that there was nowhere at that moment I would rather be.” (p.278)
.
I have never been on that specific mountain, but I know exactly what he means.
.
-Zenwind.
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
