Interesting Quote from Mountains of the Mind
Reading a book about the cultural history of mountain life and found this quote. Thought it was particulary relevant to the mountain experiences we share. Going to the mountains... is like pushing through the fur coats into Narnia. In the mountainous world, things behave in odd and unexpected ways. Time, too, bends and alters. In the face of the geological time-scales on display, your mind releases its normal grip on time. Your interest and awareness of the world beyond the mountains falls away and is replaced with a much more immediate hierarchy of needs: warmth, food, direction, shelter, survival. And if something goes wrong in the mountains, then time shivers and reconfigures itself about that moment, that incident. Everything leads up to it, or spirals out of it. Temporarily you have a new centre of existence.
Returning to earth after being in the mountains - stepping back out of the wardrobe, can be a disorienting experience. Like Peter, Edmund, Susan and Lucy returning from Narnia, you expect everything to have changed. You half-expect the first people you see to grip you by the elbow and ask you if you are all right, to say 'You've been away for years.' But usually no one notices you've been gone at all. And the experiences you have had are largely incommunicable to those who were not there. Returning to daily life after a trip to the mountains, I have often felt as though I were a stranger re-entering my country after years abroad, not yet adjusted to my return, and bearing experiences beyond speech.