Montanhas da/na mente

Na próxima semana, no âmbito da comemoração do Dia Internacional das Montanhas, vamos abordar, na sede da Federação de Campismo e Montanhismo de Portugal (Lisboa) e na Biblioteca Municipal de Lagoa (Lagoa – Algarve), um conjunto de temáticas em torno do pensar/sentir a montanha. Nesse contexto, deixamos aqui uma citação extraída do livro Mountains of the Mind – A History of a Fascination, de Robert MacFarlane (Granta Books, 2003), que constitui uma das inspiradoras referências bibliográficas a que iremos recorrer.

© da/na Net

As late as 1791 William Gilpin noted that ‘the generality of people’ found wilderness dislikeable. ‘There are few’, he continued, ‘who do not prefer the busy scenes of cultivation to the greatest of nature’s rough productions.’ Mountains nature’s roughest productions, were not only agriculturally intractable, they were also aesthetically repellent : it was felt that their irregular and gargantuan outlines upset the natural spirit-level of the mind. The politer inhabitants of the seventeenth century referred to mountains disapprovingly as ‘deserts’ ; they were also castigated as ‘boils’ on the earth’s complexion, ‘warts’, ‘wens’, ‘excrescences’ and even, with their labial ridges and vaginal valleys, ‘Nature’s pudenda’.

Moreover, mountains were dangerous places to be. It was believed that avalanches could be triggered by stimuli as light as a cough, the foot of a beetle, or the brush of a bird’s wing as it swooped low across a loaded snow-slope. You might fall between the blue jaws of a crevasse, to be regurgitated years later by the glacier, pulped and rigid. Or you might encounter a god, demi-god or monster angry at having their territory trespassed upon – for mountains were conventionally the habitat of the supernatural and the hostile. In his famous Travels, John Manderville described the tribe of Assassins who lived high among the peaks of the Elbruz range, presided over by the mysterious ‘Old Man of the Mountain’. In Thomas’s More’s Utopia the Zapoletes – a ‘hideous, savage and fierce’ race – are reputed to dwell ‘in the high mountains’. True, mountains had in the past provided refuge for beleaguered peoples – it was to the mountains that Lot and his daughters fled when they were driven out of Zoar, for instance – but for the most part they were a form of landscape to be avoided. Go around mountains by all means, it was thought, along their flanks or between them if absolutely necessary – as many merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and missionaries had to – but certainly not up them.

During the second half of the 1700, however, people started for the first time to travel to mountains out of a spirit other than necessity, and a coherent sense began to develop of the splendour of moutainous landscape. The summit of Mont Blanc was reached in 1786, and mountaineering proper came into existence in the middle of the 1800s, induced by a commitment to science (in the sport’s adolescence, no respectable mountaineer would scale a peak without at the very least boiling a thermometer on the summit) but very definitely born of beauty. The complex aesthetics of ice, sunlight, rock, height, angles and air – what John Ruskin called the ‘endless perspicuity of space ; the unfatigued veracity of eternal light’ – were to the later nineteenth-century mind unquestionably marvellous. Mountains began to exert a considerable and often fatal power of attraction on the human mind. ‘The effect of this strange Matterhorn upon the imagination is indeed so great,’ Ruskin could claim proudly of his favourite mountain in 1862, ‘that even the gravest philosophers cannot resist it’. Three years later the Matterhorn was climbed for the first time ; four of the successful summitteers fell to their deaths during the descent.

(…) Today the emotions and attitudes which impelled the early mountaineers still proper in the Western imagination : indeed if anything they are more unshiftably ensconced there. Mountain-worship is a given to million of people. The vertical, the ferocious, the icy – all these are now automatically venerated forms of landscape, images of wich permeate an urbanized Western culture increasingly hungry for even second-hand experiences of wildness and wilderness. Mountain-going has been one of the fastest growing leisure activities of the past twenty years. An estimated 10 million Americans go mountaineering annually, and 50 million go hiking. Some 4 million people in Britain consider themselves to be hill-walkers of one stripe or another.

(…) Over the course of three centuries, therefore, a tremendous revolution of perception occurred in the West concerning mountains. (…) So drastic was this revolution that to contemplate it now is to be reminded of a truth about landscapes ; that our responses to them are for the most part culturally devised. That is to say, when we look at a landscape, we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there. We attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically posses – savageness, for example, or bleakness – and we value it accordingly. We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.

(…) What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans – a mountain of the mind.

[MACFARLANE, 2003 : 14-19]

REFERÊNCIA BIBLIOGRÁFICA

MACFARLANE, Robert. Mountains of the Mind – A History of a Fascination. Londres : Granta Books, 2003, pp. 310. ISBN