Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #TheLivingMountain
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I want to end our #CoReadingVirus journey together by gathering & celebrating some of the creative work that's arisen in response to Nan's work/the Cairngorms. Please do add to this thread with anything you think relevant, including your own writing, art, music! Here goes... 
...there's @Jenny_Sturgeon's forthcoming album The Living Mountain, inspired by Nan's work, out in autumn this year: Jenny's put two *beautiful* tracks (recorded in the Cairngorms) up for the group to listen to here (one arising from the 'Man' chapter)...
soundcloud.com/hudsonrecords/…
soundcloud.com/hudsonrecords/…
...then there's @NapierHamish's beautiful album The Woods, with Somhairle MacDonald. Just released. I've been listening to a lot in these hard weeks, and it's transported me to the Caledonian pine forest & the Cairngorms. You can listen too, here: hamishnapier.bandcamp.com/album/the-woods
The penultimate & last chapter of #TheLivingMountain, 'The Senses' & 'Being', seem to me to flow together into a remarkable prose-poem that doesn't rise to a peak (for this would formally gainsay Nan's allegiance to exploration rather than conclusion)...
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#CoReadingVirus
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#CoReadingVirus
...but that instead argues for a gorgeous, ongoing mutual plenishment & exchange of encounter: "The thing to be known grows with the knowing."
What are the phrases, propositions & images that most struck you in the course of these chapters' flow?
And more specifically...
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What are the phrases, propositions & images that most struck you in the course of these chapters' flow?
And more specifically...
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...what do you understand (if that is not too acquisitive or conclusive a verb) by Nan's declaration that in the Cairngorms she has "walked out of the body & into the mountain", becoming "a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage"?
[Photos by @robpetit]
[Photos by @robpetit]
Hello all & welcome to the last gathering of the #CoReadingVirus group read of Nan Shepherd's #TheLivingMountain. To start with something I've long found very hard to come by, even when times are good, "Sleep"...
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...Nan writes beautifully in Chapter 10 abt her habit of sleeping out in the mountains & the revelations that come to her when so doing; "moments of quiescent perceptiveness", the drumming of snipe, a roe deer glimpsed & other "mis-spellings"/enchantments of outdoor sleep...[2/3]
...my first question is whether you have spent memorable nights (or days) sleeping out, under canvas or under a sky "as bland as silk"? If so: where, when, what happened that has stayed with you since & what do you recognise in Nan's descriptions of "nights out of doors"?
Lastly for this evening, my now-traditional enquiry as to which phrases, images & sentences you found most resonant & why? These chapters are, to my mind, absolute treasure-houses in terms of one-liners:
"Life, it seems, won't be warned off."
"I like the unpath best"
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"Life, it seems, won't be warned off."
"I like the unpath best"
...
"Knowledge does not dispel mystery"
"You wait, & soon the birds forget you"
I could go on & on. But I'd rather hear from you, of course. Meanwhile, if you'll forgive the indulgence, here's me & my younger brother on the plateau, back in the days of cagoules.
As for next time...
"You wait, & soon the birds forget you"
I could go on & on. But I'd rather hear from you, of course. Meanwhile, if you'll forgive the indulgence, here's me & my younger brother on the plateau, back in the days of cagoules.
As for next time...
...I suggest we meet again *for the last time* at 8pm BST, Sat 11 April, having read Chapters 9-12 (i.e. to the end of #TheLivingMountain). I want then to grow a resource list of the wondrously rich & diverse creative responses that the Cairngorms & Nan's work have inspired...
The Nan Shepherd/The Living Mountain #CoReadingVirus Book Group: as promised, some Sunday thoughts about how it might work. If you're new to the plan, the tweet below should help explain the idea; do join us!
Otherwise & anyway, read on & RT.
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Otherwise & anyway, read on & RT.
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...People around the world are getting hold of copies of Nan's wonderful book, written in a time of world crisis (1940s). They're buying them, borrowing them, being given them by strangers (see tweet below if you want to give or be given a copy)...
...acquiring audio-copies/e-books. It's been heart-lifting to see the global response to the idea; I've spoken about it on Canadian, New Zealand & British radio & we've participants from dozens of countries. Really, how it might work is mostly up to all of you...
So: I propose that we take Nan Shepherd's slender masterpiece The Living Mountain as the first book in the #CoReadingVirus global Twitter Reading Group. It's a beautiful, moving, wise meditation on landscape, love, nature & the nature of being.
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Shepherd wrote her book in the 1940s at a time of world crisis; it was published in 1977, near the end of her long life. It tells the story of her "traffic of love" with the Cairngorm Mountains of north-east Scotland, and of how she learned to walk "into" this landscape...
...Nan--clever, gentle Nan--re-imagined the tradition of mountain literature, & indeed of nature writing more broadly; she was drawn to passes rather than peaks, pilgrimage rather than conquest & she used the Cairngorms to "think with", exploring broad philosophical questions...
