‘[our responses to landscape] are for the most part culturally devised. When we look at a landscape we do not see what is there, but what we think is there. We attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically possess – savageness, for example, or bleakness – and we value it accordingly. We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of a shared cultural memory.’
‘Our imaginations may be awed when we look at the mountains as monuments of the slow working of stupendous forces of nature through countless millenniums.’ Leslie Stephen, 1871
The Sacred Theory of the Earth, Thomas Burnet, 1684 – theorized that the Earth began as a smooth ‘egg’ and began to be cracked and weathered by the sun until the crust broke and the water on which it sat burst forwards, aligning with the Great Flood in the Bible. When this flood receded it left behind ruins which we live in today, and these great swirling flood waters were what churned the Earth’s surface up into mountains. – first person to question whether the Earth’s surface had always been the same
Georges Buffon – questioned how old the Earth was, but tried to keep his guesses in line with the Bible (although a calculation of several billion years was posthumously found in his notes)
‘The apparent permanence of mountains and coastlines is an illusion born of our diminutive life-spans.’
‘Here then was another vertigo – the giddiness inspired by deep time – to add to the more familiar and immediate kind one might feel on a steep mountainside. The experience of going to the mountains had become, as Burnet had suggested a century earlier, one not only of moving upwards in space, but also backwards through time.’
‘The horizontal striations scored into it showed that this rock had once been a scratching-post of the glacier which had created the valley and was one of the places where it had rubbed its tremendous underbelly along the ground.’
‘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 in 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 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. 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.’
‘If a mountain could not withstand the ravages of time, what chance a city or civilisation?’
‘The hills are shadows, and they flow/ From form to form, and nothing stands; / They melt like mist, the solid lands, / Like clouds they shape themselves and go.’ (from In Memoriam, Tennyson)
‘And there, between two layers of grey rock, was a square yard of silver mica, seething brilliantly in the sunlight – probably the first sunlight to strike it in millions of years. It was like opening up a chest filled to the brim with silver, like opening up a book to find a mirror leafed inside it, or like opening a trapdoor to reveal a vault of time so dizzyingly deep that I might have fallen head-first into it.’
‘Only the clouds chimerically forming and reforming miles above me kept up any sort of movement or rhythm by which time could be calibrated. Otherwise, I might have belonged to any aeon. Nothing, it seemed to me then, could be more permanent, nothing more fixed than this tableau of dazzling ice and dark rock – a scene which had lasted for perpetuity and could only continue to do so. The landscape existed above and beyond me; I only happened to be there, a bystander genuinely of no consequence. Nothing more.’
‘A glacier is an endless scroll, a stream of time upon whose stainless ground is engraven the succession of events, whose dates far transcend the memory of living man. Assuming the length of a glacier to be roughly twenty miles. and its annual progression to be 500 feet, the block which is now discharged from its surface on the terminal moraine may have started from its rocky origin in the reign of Charles I!’ -James Forbes
‘My sense of wonder at the frozen waterfall and the halted river derived from the absolute stasis of something that would normally be absolutely turbulent. Perhaps our quickening obsession with speed has something to do with our end-of-the-worldliness: the latent sense, unique to our modern age, that apocalypse might come either by ice (the death of the sun) or by fire (nuclear holocaust).’
‘How strange is this wild urge for rapid locomotion seizing all people of all nations at the same instant. ‘The dead go swiftly’, says the ballad. Are we dead then? Or could this be some pre-sentiment of the approaching doom of our planet, possessing us to multiply the means of communication so we may travel over its entire surface in the little time left to us?’ -Theophile Gautier, 1884
‘We construct our models of progress on a gradient. We move on up, or we sink back down. It is harder to do the former than the latter, but that makes it only more admirable. One does not, under any linguistic circumstances, progress down. Most religions operate on a vertical axis in which heaven is or their analogue of that state is up, and its opposite is down. To ascend, therefore, is in some fundamental way to approach divinity.’ – links to idea that aerial photography wasn’t around in the time of the first mountain climbers, so the aerial views they would have seen would be in their mind almost god-like views, not seen by any other man
‘vast, swallowing distances of visual space’
‘all visitors to altitude were drawn in part by the conviction that they would be rewarded with both far sight and insight: that mindscapes as well as landscapes would be revealed to them’
‘The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space.’
‘Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.’ (Charles Baudelaire) – the obsession with/allure of the unknown
‘where knowledge faded out, legend began’
‘My father taught me to read contour lines, so that the whole map rose magically out of itself.’
‘Maps give you seven-league boots – allow you to cover miles in seconds. Using the point of a pencil to trace the line of an intended walk or climb, you can soar over crevasses, leap tall cliff-faces at a single bound and effortlessly ford rivers. On a map the weather is always good, the visibility always perfect. A map offers you the power of perspective over a landscape: reading one is like flying over a country in an aeroplane – a deodorized, pressurized, temperature-controlled survey.’
‘Maps do not take account of time, only of space. They do not acknowledge how a landscape is constantly on the move – is constantly revising itself. Watercourses are always transporting earth and stone. Gravity tugs rocks off hillsides and rolls them lower down. Grouse swallow quartz chips to use in their craw, and excrete them elsewhere. There is a continual trafficking of objects, of stones. Other changes occur. A sudden rain-shower can transform a tiny tributary stream into an uncrossable torrent. The meltwater outflow from the mouth of a glacier will sculpt silt into ceaselessly changing patterns of abstract beauty. These are the dimensions of a landscape which go unindicated by a map.’
our instinct to place-name isn’t just to label and claim (although it is this to an extent), but also a method of narrative: ‘For the explorers, names gave meaning and structure to a landscape which might otherwise have been repetitively meaningless. They shaped space, allowed points to be held in relation to one another. They provided a stability – the stability of language, of narrative, of plot – to the perpetually changing upper world or ice and storm and rock through which they moved. Naming was and remains a way to place space within a wider matrix of significance: a way, essentially, to make the unknown known.’
as the Victorians explored more and more of the Earth they realised the need for there to always be an unknown somewhere – the unknown is what spurs the imagination – hence there was an outcry when it was announced that Everest was to be climbed
rime ice is a delicate feather-like ice formation when cold air blows freezing water droplets onto a cold surface – it grows into the wind – ‘So by the alignment of rime ice on a rock you can tell which way the prevailing wind has been blowing: an example of how the land keeps its own meteorological archives.’
‘It was the collision of India with Tibet that created the Himalaya geologically. And it was the collision in the nineteenth century of the northward-expanding British Empire with the eastward-expanding Russian Empire which created the Himalaya in the Western imagination.’
‘the letter feels like a connection with Ruth: ‘I am conscious of you at the other end; and very often dearest one I summon up your image & have your presence in some way near me.”
‘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.’
‘I thought about the snow hare; about how for an animal like this to cross one’s path was to be reminded that it had a path too – that I had crossed the snow hare’s path as much as it had crossed mine.’
Anna Harris 