Cabinet Magazine Online - O Altitudo!: An Interview with Robert Macfarlane - The Diigo Meta page

• 01 Sep 08
  

  interview mountain_climbing art literature landscape climate_crisis turner ruskin

  • Functionally, mountains are objectionable; agriculturally, they’re useless; and in terms of pilgrimage and trade, they’re obstructive.
  • that fatigue, discomfort, sensory excess. Mountains disturb the spirit level of the perceiver’s mind, as well as the systems of the body, and so again and again we get anecdotes from those who’ve crossed the Alps in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and been somehow perturbed.
  • wonder as prompting an urge to explain or to give an account. Confronted with a wonder, you are at first astonished, and then you wish to understand how you came to be astonished: wonder, for Descartes, is the root of science. The eighteenth-century sublime, on the other hand, is quite a vulgar form of affect in many of its manifestations: it obliterates all impulses except its own.
  • the sublime can stop you seeing, oddly: it begins as a heightened response and ends as an ossified response that interposes itself almost totally between person and place.
    
  • This is both an egotistical and a quashing experience: you see backwards in time, outwards in space, and are both uplifted and diminished by that experience. For whatever reason, that mixture of self-celebration and self-obliteration
  • you’re inhabiting an inconceivably ancient landscape which is itself the present avatar of ghostly landscapes that once were. If you have a certain inductive quality of vision—such as that which Lyell’s work taught hundreds of thousands of people to have—you can see those ghost landscapes.
  • So people like Ruskin and Darwin come to stand on mountaintops and are able to observe, or imagine they are observing, not what is there but what was there and what will be there.
  • You could say that metaphor kills Mallory, that he was murdered by figure. For he is drawn to Everest not out of any fondness for the thing itself, but because he had been taught to love the idea of Everest, and all that it, in its superlativeness, represented. Mountains are—like all inanimate nature—entirely indifferent to their pictures and their picturers.

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