A little higher, a little further. If the sky is the limit, as some fervent capitalists claim, just before the limit lies the summit of the highest mountains.
Originally published twenty years ago, the very first book by Robert Macfarlane, a British writer presented by his French publisher as “the most famous travel writer in the Anglo-Saxon world” — enough to make Bruce Chatwin pale, if that. was still possible —, The spirit of the summits. How mountains have fascinated humanity examines our relationship with mountains through history and literature.
Story of a fascination, commented journey of the construction of an imagination, accelerated history of mountaineering, presentation of the great discoveries of geology, The spirit of the summits compresses all of that. The author has also included in his book, perhaps a little static and disjointed, some personal stories of travels and climbs.
In the space of three centuries, says Macfarlane, there has occurred in the West a “prodigious revolution” in our perception of mountains. “The faults that we found in them until then – the steepness, the desolation, the danger – ended up becoming their most sought-after qualities. »
Residence of the gods, objects of beauty, then sporting challenge to accomplish: what we call a mountain, much more than a geological event, is in reality “a collaboration between the physical forms of the world and the imagination of humans”.
“Because it’s there”
There we come across men – especially men – who look further than the horizon or raise their heads towards the sky. Windham and Pococke who drink wine from the bottle to celebrate the first excursion on the glaciers of Savoy in 1741. The writer Samuel Johnson who frolicked at the same time on the ridges of the Scottish coast. Or the German painter Caspar David Friedrich who in 1818 got his hands on his famous Traveler contemplating a sea of clouds.
The spirit of the summits, it is also George Mallory (1886-1924), attracted to the point of madness (and to death) by Everest, who arrived in Bombay in 1922 with two tons of luggage during his second attempt to climb the highest peak in the world. Ropes, ice axes and crampons, but also cases of champagne, quail terrines in jelly, ginger and walnut biscuits.
When a journalist once asked him why he wanted to climb Everest, Mallory replied: “Because it’s there.” »
But still ? It’s this question, this “But still?” », What Macfarlane tries to answer. The author ofUnderland and of By the paths (Les Arènes, 2020 and 2022) wonders why certain people, including himself, need to think outside the box and are attracted at the risk of their lives by these “terrible objects”, as Edmund Burke called them.
From the first geological revolutions to the coup of the British military expedition to Tibet in 1904, from Buffon to John Ruskin, from glaciers to ropes, Macfarlane sees high.