11.17.25
A book review of The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd. It was an assignment for one of my classes, and the book review I was proudest of and enjoyed writing the most this semester. (This might be becuase it was the last of 4 book reviews we had to write, and it definitley felt like I could get into a flow much quicker with this one). Curious to hear anyone's thoughts on the book if you've read it, and definitely reccomend reading it if you haven't!
...The Living Mountain is a deeply personal journey through what feels like one’s “cabinet of curiosities”, with the cabinet in this text being the Cairngorm mountains. Through intimate storytelling, Nan Shepherd shares what makes this place meaningful and relational. Her poetic prose emphasizes sensory experiences, carefully considering how the pieces of a mountain smell, feel, look and sound. Shepherd strikes a balance between her embodied sensory experience, and the varied and emergent modes of knowledge of more-than-human perspectives. Her relationship to knowledge seeking rests more on curiosity than a desire to understand the inner workings of the environments around us. She remains open and surprised by what emerges, for “the thing to be known grows with the knowing” (p.108).
The text is an invitation to the “inside of the mountain”, countering the mountaineering tendencies to summit and instead engaging in a committed relationship to “merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him” (p.15). This situating enmeshes the human within the landscape, rather than a separated outside observer. Each chapter of the book focuses on different “elementals” that make up the mountains such as water, plants, animals, plateaus, and humans. However, while reading it, one becomes aware of the interconnectedness between elementals, illustrating how “all are aspects of one entity, the living mountain” (p.48).
Shepherd troubles the dualisms between mind and body, human and nature, through an attentiveness to the reflexive flow between external (elements outside ourselves) and internal (our spirit, mind, bodies) landscapes. Her Taoist influences are present in this dualistic unsettling and feel akin to the work of Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), both texts working to mirror exterior and interior landscapes through nuanced storytelling.
Shepherd departs from this at times through viewing the landscape as sublime. Both a “monstrous place” and “a miracle of beauty” (p.44). A place with fear, exhilaration and unfathomable power. This reaffirms the human-nature divisions she seeks to trouble. In the section on snow, she associates the observed regularity of water droplets with humans, thus viewing the more-than-human as not having patterns, rhythms or their own versions of regularity. In another example she describes life as invincible—that when “everything is against it [life]...it pays no heed” (p.49). This counters the cyclical and relational views she holds throughout the book that make life of the mountain possible. Viewing the unknown as only external to ourselves re-makes the human as an all-knowable being, putting us outside of the world we are a part of.
This contradictory thought, however, is an important reflection of our own processes for engaging with the world. I appreciated being able to contend with my own contradictions relating to landscape and believe it is important to continue doing so. Shepherd’s contribution remains incredibly relevant to current times and crises. It is a reminder of the “innocence we have lost”, and an offering for how to live “in one sense at a time to live all the way through” (p.105).