IN THE WORKS OF NAN SHEPHERD

SELF AND ENVIRONMENT

F E B R U A R Y 1 1 , 1 8 9 3 - F E B R U A R Y 2 3 , 1 9 8 8

NAN SHEPHERD

The Quarry Wood (1928)

The Weatherhouse (1930)

A Pass in the Grampians (1933)

In the Cairngorms (1934)

The Living Mountain (1940s) (published 1977)

BOOKS BY NAN SHEPHERD

This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens ones sense of outer reality. … By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see the world upside down. How new it has become. … Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker.

The Living Mountain

This is how the earth must see itself

Each forgot that the other was there. Fire, earth, space, the wind – in labour with these elemental things they became as it were dissolved into their own elements. Memory was gone, and consciousness of selfhood, and all the intricate coils of living. They drew back at last, by common consent, for the fire was mastered. … They then became aware of themselves. Their eyes met, and they smiled. … the look that they had exchanged, on this clear spring day beside the charring heather, carried in it all the consciousness of all that they had seen, smelt, heard, known and undergone upon the moor.

A Pass in the Grampians, 18-9

“The embodied mind was, in a largely untheorised way, central to the project of mainstream literary modernism”

Patricia Waugh, ‘Thinking in Literature’ (2012)

William JamesThe Principles of Psychology (1890)

The embodied and adaptive mind

“no mental modification ever occurs which is not

accompanied or followed by a bodily change”

As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. But, as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasise and turn to with a will. These are our living realities

William JamesThe Principles of Psychology

close to his ear … which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke. … A m arvellous discovery indeed--that the hum an voice in certain atm ospheric conditions … can quicken trees into life! … leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by m illions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, m ade that statem ent

“Come out, you there. Myself. That’s me. That’s me. I thrust him in – I am rescuing myself.”

“Don’t take him from me, you chaps. It’s myself. I have been wounded – here, in the abdomen…” And he put his arms round the shapeless horror he had dragged bumping from its hole.

The Weatherhouse, 55

“an encounter with someone

else’s needs and reality”

Gillian Carter, 51

“the absoluteness

revealed in the other's visage

causes an earthquake in my

existence”Adriann Peperzak, To The

Other, 1993, 25

“Queer isn’t it, about oneself? Losing oneself like that, I mean, and being someone else?”

The Weatherhouse, p.55

“Strange stagnant world—he hated its complacency. Standing there on the ridge, dimly aware of miles of dark and silent land, Garry felt a sort of scorn for its quietude: earth, and men made from earth, dumb, graceless, burdened as itself.

This place is dead,” he thought.

The Weatherhouse, p. 56.

It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow that creeps in on us continuously and can be held off a continuous creative act. So, simply, to look on anything such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being

The Living Mountain, p. 80

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THIS NARROW LOCH HAS NEVER, I BELIEVE, BEEN SOUNDED.

LOCH AVON

When the noonday sun penetrated directly into the water, we stripped and bathed. How clear it was only this walking into it could reveal. What we saw under water had greater clarity than what we saw through air. […] Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is its true bottom. And through that inordinate clearness we saw to the depth of the pit. So limpid was it that every stone was clear. I motioned to my companion, who was a step behind, and she came, and glanced as I had down the submerged precipice. Then we looked into each other’s eyes, and again into the pit. I waded slowly back into shallower water. My spirit was as naked as my body. It was one of the most defenceless moments of my life

The Living Mountain, 10

That first glance down had shocked me with a heightened power of myself, in which even fear became a rare exhilaration: not that it ceased to be fear, but fear itself, so impersonal, so keenly apprehended, enlarged rather than constricted the spirit.

The Living Mountain, 11

“Knowing another is endless. “The thing to be known grows with the knowing” The Living Mountain p. 84.