Introduction by Robert Macfarlane
Afterword by Jeanette Winterson
154 pages
Published 1977
Read March 9
Rating: 4 out of 5
I've wanted to read this book for years. I first learned about it in the works of Robert Macfarlane, who in all his books has been a tireless evangelist for The Living Mountain. Unsurprisingly, he appears to have been instrumental in bringing it back into print. Characteristically rambling and allusive, Macfarlane’s introductory essay insists on preparing the way for Shepherd’s words for almost thirty pages, including references -- nearly a third as long as Shepherd's entire text.
It would be difficult for any book to live up to that kind of fevered promotion. The Living Mountain, however, is an impressive book. The neglected human art of getting to know a particular place in deep, all-season detail, of finding new perspectives and new revelations in familiar grounds, of finding that Zen-like poise of bodily awareness of the elemental landscape, soars and floods through Shepherd's precise and beautiful prose.
I've never gotten to know a place as well as Shepherd got to know her native Cairngorms, but I've come close to that meditative natural transcendence often enough in the past that my body responded almost physically to her descriptions. It is a gorgeous book, equally at home with the transcendental writings of the early 20th century as it is with the modern British art of landscape essay.
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