What we call a mountain is in fact a collaboration of the physical form of the world with the imagination of humans - a mountain of the mind. And the way people behave towards mountains has little or nothing to do with the actual objects of rock and ice themselves. Mountains are only contingencies of geology. They do not kill deliberatly, nor do they deliberately please; any emotional property whic they possess are vested in them by human imaginations. Mountains - like deserts, polar tundra, deep oceans, jungles and all the other wild landscapes that we have romanticized into being - are simply there, and there they remain, their physical structures rearranged gradually over time by forces of geology and weather, but continuing to exist over and beyond human perceptions of them. But they are also the products of human perception; they have been imagined into existence down the centuries. This book tries to plot how those ways of imagining mountains have altered over time.
Okay, I´m intrigued. I have never read a non-fiction book with an approach like this to a subject matter before.
9
3
