The Living Mountain (Canons): A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland: 6

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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: 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.

Around the time Virginia Woolf beheld the magnificent interleaving of every part of nature in the epiphany that made her an artist and before Rachel Carson made ecology a household word, Shepherd serenades the intricate ecosystem of the mountain: Nan Shepherd was born on 11 February 1893 at Westerton Cottage, Cults, now a suburb of Aberdeen, to John and Jane Shepherd. Shortly after her birth, the family moved to Dunvegan, Cults, the house she then lived in for most of her life. [3] She attended Aberdeen High School for Girls and graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 1915. Even though it is so short, Shepherd still manages to covey the sense of place, the beauty and the wildness of the Cairngorms with such amazing brevity. The prose is lyrical and poetic with an incredible eye for detail, as she describes the colours of the earth and heathers or the pure quality of the streams and rivers, or the luminosity of the light.

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The essays are loosely themed (water, light, plants, sleep), meandering both physically and introspectively all over the Cairngorms and highlighting Shepherd's favorite sights, sensations, events. From the chapter on water: Shepherd's fiction brings out the sharp conflict between the demands of tradition and the pull of modernity, particularly in the nature of women's lives in the changing times. All three novels assign a major role to the landscape and weather in small northern Scottish communities they describe. [4] Poetry [ edit ]

My hope was that it might change in some measure the ways we imagine the landscape of Essex, and of south-east England more generally. The programme was an hour long, but took almost a year in the field to film.

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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'. In the audiobook, Tilda Swinton reads the original writing by Nan Shepherd. Robert Macfarlane reads his section and Jeanette Winterson hers. All are easy to follow and clearly read. I have given the narration a four star rating. It is all very well done. 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!

Nan Shepherd logged decades in Scotland's Cairngorms, a mountain range in that country's northeast, and wrote a book about her relationship with those mountains in the 1940s. The Living Mountain did not see print, however, until the 1970s. And now, among a subset of nature-writing fans, it is a mini-classic of sorts, a Scottish Walden born of the mountains instead of a pond.Shepherd subsequently lectured for the Aberdeen College of Education. [4] She retired from teaching in 1956, but edited the Aberdeen University Review until 1963. The university awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1964. [5] She remained a friend and a supporter of other Scottish writers, including Neil M. Gunn, Marion Angus and Jessie Kesson. 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. 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?

The book is in 12 sections, each of which explores an aspect of the Cairngorms and life on them: "Water, Frost and Snow", "The Recesses", "The Senses", "Man", "Being". Reading the book, you realise that these apparently separate sections are bound laterally to each other by rhymes of colour, thought and word, so that they form a transverse weave. In this way, too, the book's form acts out its central proposition, which is that the world will not fall into divisible realms, as an apple may be sliced, but is instead a meshwork of interrelations. "So there I lie on the plateau," writes Shepherd. The audiobook puts the introduction by Robert Macfarlane at the book’s end. He expresses how he interprets Nan’s lines. It is right to put the introduction at the book’s end! There is an additional follow-up essay by Jeanette Winterson. Here she expresses her thoughts on Nan’s writing. Both the introduction and the follow-up essay are extremely good. They add to the value of the book. They further open readers’ eyes to the wide scope of Nan’s writing. Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most male mountaineers are focused on the goal of the summit. Shepherd, however, goes into the Cairngorms aimlessly, "merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him". "I am on the plateau again, having gone round it like a dog in circles to see if it is a good place," she begins one section, "I think it is, and I am to stay up here for a while."

By setting foot sideways to the growth of the heather, and pressing the sprays down, one can walk easily enough. Dried mud flats, sun-warmed, have a delicious touch, cushioned and smooth; so has long grass at morning, hot in the sun, but still cool and wet when the foot sinks into it, like food melting to a new flavour in the mouth. And a flower caught by the stalk between the toes is a small enchantment."