I’m currently reading In the Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule by Johanna Kavenna. So far, it has made me quite curious to visit Iceland. But that’s in a general sense. So far only one passage of the book has particularly struck me — when she begins, she goes to Norway to visit Arne Naess, who she describes as ‘the ageing conscience of an oil-rich nation,’ and ‘a philosopher of the pending eco-apocalypse,’ in his nineties when she visited, but with a life long series of outdoor interactions.
When I said to the hotel manager that I was going to visit him, he had told me that Arne used to climb up the buildings in the University of Oslo. Students would wait for him in a lecture room, and he would appear through the window. I wanted to ask this old man in the thick jumper if it was true, but something more substantial seemed to be required.
Instead she asks him about Thule, about the idea of a wild place beyond the outer limits of space. He reminisces about Norwegian nature in his childhood, the way that Norwegians have historically lived fairly solitary lives on homesteads and thus had more connections to the land than to other people, and this is being lost…
‘So have people lost this experience?’ I was asking.
Arne never answered a question directly. It made him slightly gnomic, with his head cocked to one side and a slight smile curling his lips.
‘I want to tell you about mountains,’ he said. ‘I have seen a lot of mountains. In the mountains you have a basic sense of upward, ascent. And this is positive,’ he was adding. ‘”Ascent” is a positive word. Up and up. A great increase. And so on. So you have feelings there which are satisfied without you knowing it. You see, there is the sky. The bigness of mountains, that’s one thing, and then you have the greatness. There are some mountains in western Norway which are just as great as Mount Everest. But they are not so big, but that is not the essence of mountains, it’s not the bigness, it’s the up, the getting higher, and the broadening of the outlook, seeing vast areas.’
When this wizened philosopher could still climb, he refused to reach the tops of mountains, renouncing the quest for domination over the natural world, he claimed. A sense of the smallness of the self, the vastness of nature, he seemed to be saying, was somehow revitalizing, a healthy experience to have from time to time. Arne thought that the only goal of his submission was to find unity with nature, and he started to tell a story about when he climb a series of peaks, across the Mediterranean.
‘I started getting to the summit of each mountain, but after about thirty summits, I could go just because of the beauty and the greatness. And even though the summit was only ten metres from me, I would not take those ten metres, to include that summit also in my list of summits. I would just go where it was great to go. I was getting more mature. Going for days and days and days, I more mature. What is really here? What’s the greatness, what’s the greatness? What’s the greatness of my experience in these mountains? And then of course the summits were not counted any longer, at all.’
This is so different from the way most people go about thinking of mountains, myself included. I cannot remember who said it, or even the exactness of the quote, but someone being asked why climb a mountain? and replying, simply, because it is there. But if you stop to think a moment, the rest of the mountain is there, too.
