I walk therefore I am

Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most of them focus on the goal of the summit. Nan Shepherd's aimless, sensual exploration of the Cairngorms is bracingly different
Robert Macfarlane
Fri 29 Aug 2008 19.01 EDT

The Cairngorm mountains of north-east Scotland are Britain's Arctic. In winter, storm winds of up to 170mph rasp the upper shires of the range, and avalanches scour its lee slopes. Even in summer, snow lies in the deeper corries of the massif, sintering slowly into ice. The aurora borealis can be seen from its summits - billowing curtains of green or, more rarely, red light. In places, the wind blows so insistently that pine trees grow to just a few inches high, spreading across the ground in densely woven dwarf forests. It is a terrain shaped by what Nan Shepherd, in her masterpiece about the region, called "the elementals".

Shepherd was born in Aberdeen in 1893 and died there in 1981, and during her long life she spent hundreds of days and covered thousands of miles exploring the Cairngorms on foot. Her reputation rests on the three modernist novels she published between 1928 and 1933 (The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse, A Pass in the Grampians), but to my mind her most important work is her least known - an 80-page prose meditation called The Living Mountain. Shepherd, who worked as a teacher for most of her life, wrote the book during the last years of the second world war and the first years of its aftermath. She then put the manuscript in a drawer for three decades, until finally she consented to its publication in 1977. It is now almost forgotten, kept admirably in print by Canongate, its admirers fierce but few. Given the current surge of interest in the literature of nature and place, however, it's a book that might - should - attract a new generation of readers.

The Living Mountain is a difficult work to describe. A celebratory prose-poem? A geo-poetic quest? A philosophical inquiry into the nature of knowledge? None of these quite fits, though it is all of them in part. Shepherd herself called it "a traffic of love", with "traffic" implying "exchange" and "mutuality" rather than "congestion" or "blockage". Its prose is weathered in both senses: filled with different kinds of climate, but also the result of decades of contact with "the elementals". It is about the Cairngorms in the same way that Ulysses is about Dublin, or Mrs Dalloway is about London - which is to say, it is attentive to the specifics of its chosen landscape, but also passionately metaphysical.

The book is in 12 sections, each of which explores an aspect of the Cairngorms and life on them: "Water, Frost and Snow", "The Recesses", "The Senses", "Man", "Being". Reading the book, you realise that these apparently separate sections are bound laterally to each other by rhymes of colour, thought and word, so that they form a transverse weave. In this way, too, the book's form acts out its central proposition, which is that the world will not fall into divisible realms, as an apple may be sliced, but is instead a meshwork of interrelations. "So there I lie on the plateau," writes Shepherd.

"under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow - the total mountain."

"And" is one of Shepherd's favourite words in The Living Mountain, being the conjunction that implies connection without hierarchy.

Most works of mountain literature are written by men, and most male mountaineers are focused on the goal of the summit. Shepherd, however, goes into the Cairngorms aimlessly, "merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him". "I am on the plateau again, having gone round it like a dog in circles to see if it is a good place," she begins one section, "I think it is, and I am to stay up here for a while."

The Living Mountain is worth reading for its observational acuity alone. It is thick with the kinds of perception that come only from "staying up for a while"; from the repeated idle traversals of a landscape: "Birch needs rain to release its odour. It is a scent with body to it, fruity like old brandy, and on a wet warm day one can be as good as drunk with it." Shepherd notices and records "the coil over coil" of a golden eagle's ascent on a thermal, "the immature scarlet cups of the lichen", the starry saxifrage and "the white-winged ptarmigan". She spends an October night in air that is "bland as silk", and while half-asleep feels herself become stone-like, "rooted far down into immobility". She notes how a river's currents can weave floating pine needles into balls, similar to wrens' nests: structures so intertwined that "they can be lifted out of the water and kept for years, a botanical puzzle to those who have not been told the secret of their formation". (These pine-needle balls are also surreptitious emblems of Shepherd's own tightly knit and tiny work, itself "kept for years".)

Shepherd is a fierce looker, then. And like many fierce lookers, she is also a mystic, for whom empiricism is the first step to immanence. Her descriptions always move beyond the merely material. Up on the mountain, she writes, "the eye sees what it didn't see before, or sees in a new way what it had already seen. So the ear, the other senses. These moments come unpredictably, yet governed, it would seem, by a law whose working is dimly understood." Like her friend and fellow modernist novelist Neil Gunn, and like the Scottish explorer-essayist WH Murray, Shepherd had read deeply in Buddhism. Shards of Zen philosophy glitter in the prose of all three writers, like mica flecks in granite. Reading their work now - with the fusion of Scottish culture and Buddhist metaphysics - remains astonishing: like seeing a Noh play performed in a kailyard, or chrysanthemums flourishing in a corrie.

"A mountain," writes Shepherd Zennishly, "has an inside." It is a correct but counterintuitive proposition, for we tend to think of mountains in terms of their exteriors - peaks, plateaus, cliffs. But Shepherd is always looking inside the Cairngorm landscape. Again and again her eyes pry through surface: into cracks in rocks, into the luminous interior of lochs or rivers. "Into", in The Living Mountain, is a preposition that gains, through repeated use, the power of a verb. Shepherd is also fascinated by mirages of the mountain-world, the illusions that can be brought on by snow, mist, cloud or distance. She punningly calls these illusions "misspellings", visual errors that possess an accidental magic.

In one memorable passage, Shepherd describes looking at a croft during a rain shower. The wet air acts as a lens, multiplying and redistributing her sightlines, so that she seems to view all sides of the barn simultaneously. Shepherd's own style possesses a similar stereoscopic quality. Reading The Living Mountain, you experience a curious visual dissonance. Your sight feels . . . scattered, as though you've suddenly gained the compound eye of a dragonfly. This effect is created by her refusal to privilege a single perspective. The prose watches now from the point of view of the eagle, now from that of the walker, now from that of the creeping juniper. In this way we are brought to see the earth "as the earth must see itself".

"That's the way to see the world, in our own bodies," wrote the poet, Buddhist and forester Gary Snyder, and his words could stand as an epigraph to The Living Mountain. For Shepherd, being outdoors is a profoundly sensuous experience: "I am like a dog - smells excite me. The earthy smell of moss . . . is best savoured by grubbing." She lives off wild food, eating cranberries, cloudberries, blaeberries, drinking from the "strong white" water of rivers. She swims in lochs, and sleeps on hillsides, to be woken by the sharp press of a robin's claw upon her bare arm or the snuffle of a grazing deer. She records with brilliant exactness how frost "stiffens the muscles of the chin" (a part of the body we don't usually associate with muscularity, let alone thermometric sensitivity), or the pleasure of "running my hand after rain through juniper . . . for the joy of the wet drops trickling over the palm". For Shepherd, though, this sensuous relish was not an antagonist of thought, but its accomplice. In the mountains, she writes, "the body may be said to think".

This is her book's most radical proposition. Radical, because Shepherd was a woman writing out of a Highland Scottish culture in which the cherishing of the body was not easily discussed. And radical because, as philosophy, it was cutting-edge. In the same years that Shepherd composed The Living Mountain, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed his influential theory of the body-subject. For Merleau-Ponty, post-Cartesian philosophy had fallaciously divided body and mind. He argued instead that we are continually "embedded" in the "flesh" of the world: that we experience a constant exchange or "traffic" with our environment in ways that both exceed and inform our rational, intentional mind. His work, particularly The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), was dedicated to enriching the idea of the body, such that it could be said both to perceive and to think. Merleau-Ponty described this embodied experience as "knowledge in the hands", a phrase that could have come straight from Shepherd. "The body is not . . . negligible," she wrote, "but paramount".

"The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them. The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers . . . the scratchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind - nothing that I can touch or that touches me but has its own identity for the hand as much as for the eye."

It's Shepherd's belief in what might be called "bodily thinking" that gives The Living Mountain its contemporary relevance. For more and more of us experience less and less contact with the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world - its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits - as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are, literally, losing touch. Shepherd saw this loss beginning more than 60 years ago, and her book both mourns it and warns against it: "This is the innocence we have lost," she observes, "living in one sense at a time to live all the way through." Her book is a wry, beautiful hymn to "living all the way through".

And walking, for Shepherd, is the best way to "live through". On foot for hour after hour, you "walk the flesh transparent". "On the mountain," she remarks in the book's closing sentences, "I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy . . . I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. That is the final grace accorded from the mountain." This is Shepherd's version of Descartes's cogito - I walk therefore I am. She celebrates the metaphysical rhythm of the pedestrian, the iamb of the "I am", the beat of the placed and lifted foot.