While reading Mountains of the Mind, a book by Robert Macfarlane that attempts to explain why mountains are special, I dropped in little pieces of paper whenever I stumbled across an especially salient bit. It's been several weeks since I finished the book, but those marks are still there. I'll now attempt to remember what I marked and why.

Yet, despite these multiple discomforts, Burnet is happy. For here, among the mountains, he has discovered somewhere utterly unlike anywhere else: a place that has for the instant stalled his powers of comparison (23).

Yes.

The mountains, the desert, the oceans, the other, the alien; that which is not in the backyard has the power to halt, if only briefly, our thinking, our power to compare, our only real power. We are left with pure sensing. This is the ecstasy of erasure; the knowing it's all really very big out there. And we, tiny and mortal, are able to see it and see it as new.

Yet, there is is also something curiously exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realization that you do exist -- as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist (44).

In high school I found myself for reasons unclear now and then at a weekend retreat with the church youth group attended by some friends. Freaked out by all the (I now know to be quite lightweight and entirely not strident, in comparison) church going on around me I retreated at night to an open field. There, lying on my back, I stared up into the stars and watched what was revealed. As I looked, more arrived. As they impressed their millions upon me I receded from that moment in time, that place in space, and was unable to find myself. Disconnected I wandered, lost, around a nearby lake until I stumbled back into the retreat where friends and church officials expressed concern that I might kill myself. I was not suicidal, but I was care free: I was but one small mote of dust, how could I possibly matter? How could I possibly be arrogant enough to choose to matter?

Yet here I am, still.

The mountain-top became a ubiquitous symbol of emancipation for the city-bound spirit, a crystallization of the Romantic-pastoral desire to escape the atomized, socially dissolute city. You could be lonely in a city crowd, but you could find solitude on a mountain top.

I wandered lonely through the tunnels of the metro in Paris; along the streets of Munich, Copenhagen and Amsterdam; over the legs of the homeless and puking on Seattle's Broadway. But I sat alone at peace by the Pacific; in the shadow of Denali; above the White Horse on the Ridgeway; by the tall trees near my home.

The mountains tell no lies, they are alien without excuse. The people, wandering in their streets, they are you and me, and we, together, make me and you aliens.

Experience was unpredictable, more immediate and more authentic in the mountains. The upper world was an environment which affected both the mind and the body in ways the cities or the plains never did -- in the mountains, you were a different you (213).

The mountains are pornography. They are illicit sex. They are the chaotic spirit that breeds religions, ruined by codification. People go to the mountains for the same reasons they might seek a pro-dom: alter my perceptions, of the world, of me; push my edges.

The mountains describe a giant piece of space and time. The closer you get, the described edge pushes into you, opening up a little space and time within.