Immobile

Days of cold stillness then, in the space of the last 24 hours, thaw, rain, snow, sleet and a return to The Big Freeze.  I no longer choose where to walk with the dog; I walk where I can, following wavering foot-wide paths carved out by trails of grit, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, but dark and hardened, and finding myself at such prosaic destinations  as the local supermarket, a bus stop, and, once, a  primary school.   I have forgotten how to look around me when I walk. 

I’m reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (Edinburgh: Canongate 2008)– and, since freedom of movement and choice of destination has become restricted to indoor life, am reacting in unexpected ways.  Comments on climbing, such as:

… to the sober looker-on a man may seem to walk securely over dangerous places with the fey abandon that is said to be the mark of those who are doomed to death. (p. 5)

acquire relevance to what would usually be entirely inappropriate circumstances: posting a letter, buying a newspaper, visiting a neighbour.  But even without these weird connections between mountains and main roads, Shepherd’s observations strike the heart; probably  even of those who have  only ever seen mountains on postcards.  For example, describing the extraordinarily pellucid streams in the Cairngorm plateau, Shepherd writes:

Water so clear cannot be imagined, but must be seen. One must go back, and back again, to look at it, for in the interval memory refuses to recreate its brightness.   This is one if the reasons why the high plateau where these streams begin, the streams themselves, their cataracts and rocky beds, the corries, the whole wild enchantment, like a work of art is perpetually new when one returns to it.  The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away. (p. 3) 

And in that, there is a description of what it is about a work art that makes you want to keep returning to look at – its perpetual newness – that startles in being not just unexpected but as sheer as the flight of an arrow in its accuracy.  The mountain is living, not merely as an organism, but as a part of all life.