If you’ve talked to me at any great length in the past three months, there’s a decent chance our conversation has swung around, somehow, to the writing of Rob Macfarlane. I’ve been on a bit of a kick with Macfarlane’s work since back in December, when I picked up The Old Ways, his astounding and meditative account of walking ancient paths in his native Britain and around the world. It was exactly the book I needed at that moment, and a deep dive into his work followed.
As it happens, Macfarlane has a new book out this week: Is A River Alive? It’s thought-provoking, inspiring, and, at times, thrilling (there’s an account of a kayak trip in the Canadian wilderness that will put your heart in your throat, guaranteed), and once you read it, you won’t look at any feature of the natural world—even those you don’t consider sentient right now—the same way again.
But, much as I admire him, this isn’t a bit about Robert Macfarlane. It’s about the person who, more than anyone, inspired him: the Scottish writer and poet Nan Shepherd.
Shepherd, who was born at the tail end of the 19th century and died in 1981, lived her whole life just outside Aberdeen, at the foot of the Cairngorm mountains. This is not to say she never left home. In fact, as Macfarlane notes in his new introduction to her book The Living Mountain (originally published in 1977; recently reissued by Simon & Schuster), she travelled widely and prolifically. But the place she loved best was the wild, often unforgiving, sometimes downright mystical landscape she was born into. She was, Macfarlane writes, “a localist of the best kind: she came to know her chosen place closely, but that closeness served to intensify rather than to limit her vision.” Throughout her life, she probably put in more miles in the Cairngorms than anywhere else. She learned the wild spaces of her home intimately, down to the smallest detail, and at the most expansive scope possible. It was of this knowing—or yearning to know—that she wrote, and her writing is both achingly beautiful and almost impossibly observant.
Shepherd only wrote a few books, most of them published between 1928 and 1933 (The Living Mountain, written mostly during the Second World War, was put in a literal drawer for a couple decades before ever seeing print). Most of those are short. But, while I wish she’d written more, there is enough contained in the 108 pages of The Living Mountain that it’s kept me satisfied (if in near-constant reflection) for weeks. Whether she’s describing the haunting sound of two young bucks locked together in a fight, ruminating on the difference between bagging peaks as a climber and focusing on the experience of the climb, contemplating the omnipresent specter of death in such an inherently dangerous landscape, or considering the lives of the rugged, stubborn, and overwhelmingly kind people who live at the mountains’ foot, each sentence she writes contains an almost geologic number of layers. At one point, describing a clear, high-altitude loch observed from above, she says, “I know its depth, but not in feet.” That is, more or less, how I felt as I read each page.
The Living Mountain is, as the title suggests, a book that explores the idea that a mountain—any place, really—is alive, that it can be known, like a family member, a friend, or a lover. It’s also a book about how a place cannot ever fully be known, about how there will always be mystery and power—sometimes healing, sometimes clarifying, sometimes deadly—in wild places. It’s a book that can make a person feel incredibly important, connected to everything one moment, and then small, defenseless, and awestruck the next. Macfarlane is just one of a long list of contemporary writers who has credited Shepherd as a major influence, and as he puts it, “however often I read The Living Mountain, it holds astonishment for me; there is no getting accustomed to it.” I’m only on my first reading of this remarkable book, but already, I agree.
Sam Kaas and Emma Nichols own and run the Norwich Bookstore.