A friend (John Dufresne) sent me a list of the top 4 Scots books on the landscape of Scotland, and thus I chanced across Nan Shepherd’s work, The Living Mountain. The mere existence of the book is bound up in its own mythology (look it up), but I’m taking this small space to address the power of the writing, and to ask a simple question. Why is so much of nature writing so powerless and bland? Besides a couple of giants like Rick Bass, we mostly get authors producing books that anthropomorphize Nature, or mythologize it, or claim some psychic link between the environment and the writer. It comes across more than a bit like Jefferson Airplane or Depeche Mode lyrics and often feels quite naive and juvenile. New Mexico writers are no exception—we’re steeped in the mantra. Imagine a room full of people who can be quite vicious about popular fiction but not nature. One writer intones “Water is LIfe.” All others drone out the gaia doxology, “Life is Water.”
Not so for Nan Shepard. Her turf was the Cairngorms of Scotland, and her continuous explorations were not designed to summit the mountains, but to crisscross the plateau where they rose, every slope, every corrie, every chasm. She wanted to experience and understand every froth of lichen, every crack in the rock with its descending interior, every burn rising to spate. She wanted to be the witness for this vast, connected assemblage, but she did not mistake her witnessing as a portrayal of a sentience beyond her own. In a short 117 pages, Shepard delivers the most beautiful prose I’ve yet encountered in nature writing, with shocking word choice, deep subtext, and a precision. I’ll offer one example from her chapter Four, Water. She has set the scene by describing the attempt to cross a burn risen to a stream and then to a torrent: the physical cold, the unsure footing, the quality of light in and on the water, the fear. And she gives us the coda to encapsulate her inability to capture and understand the mountain’s water. “For the most appalling quality of water is its strength. I love its flash and gleam, its music, its pliancy and grace, its slap against my body; but I fear its strength. I fear it as my ancestors must have feared the natural forces that they worshipped. All the mysteries are in its movement. It slips out of holes in the earth like the ancient snake. I have seen its birth; and the more I gaze at that sure and unremitting surge of water at the very top of the mountain, the more I am baffled. . .I don’t understand it. I cannot fathom its power. . .The water is too much for me. I only know that man can’t live without it. He must see it and hear it, touch and taste it, and, no, not smell it, if he is to be in health.”
Then, having read it deeply, give it to your best friend.
Wow