Mountain Meditations, and some subjects of the day and the war — A Reader’s Guide

The Mountain as a Counterweight to Reform

The essay 'Reformers' sets up a pointed contrast between the nature-lover and the social reformer. The author, drawing on Thoreau, suggests that reformers often attack others' faults while ignoring their own: 'Every unordered spirit is its own punishment,' she quotes Augustine. The mountain worshipper, by contrast, turns deprivation into pleasure—'Take away his house and he shelters in a cave.' This is not a rejection of reform but a critique of its self-righteousness. The author implies that many reforms would be unnecessary if people abandoned artificial wants. The argument is deliberately provocative, even 'unpractical,' as she admits.

Nationality and the War's Shadow

Though the excerpts do not include the full 'Nationality' essay, the title and the book's 1917 publication date place it firmly within World War I. The earlier 'Mountain-Tops' section mentions leaving 'a conference in Geneva' and climbing through snow—a personal detail that hints at the author's pacifist or internationalist engagements. The collection's subtitle, 'some subjects of the day and the war,' signals that the mountain meditations are not escapist but a framework for addressing contemporary conflict. The author's insistence on self-culture and inner discipline reads as a response to wartime nationalism.

A Rhetoric of Contrasts

Lind-af-Hageby's prose relies on sharp antitheses: the mountain versus the plain, the hermit versus the crowd, the 'brazen self-sufficiency' of the nature-lover versus the 'joyless chase of success.' She invokes Antæus, who draws strength from the earth, to argue that contact with nature restores a 'mode of being, behind and beyond ordinary existence.' The style is aphoristic and quotable—'Give me a tree, a perfect tree, and you may keep your palaces'—but also self-aware, acknowledging that such views appear 'crotchety' to others. This tension between earnestness and irony gives the essays their distinctive voice.

Readers approaching Mountain Meditations should expect a hybrid work: part nature diary, part polemic. The author's voice is confident and occasionally combative, but the excerpts suggest a willingness to question her own positions. Pay attention to the epigraphs—Victor Hugo, Ruskin, Thoreau—as they signal the intellectual traditions she engages. The book rewards those who read slowly, letting the alpine descriptions and the wartime arguments unsettle each other.

The rain kept time with my reading of Mountain Meditations, how the author’s quiet unease about reform lingered long after I shut it. That afternoon, misplacing a bookmark, I stumbled upon another voice wrestling with similar doubts. He wasn’t climbing, just watching England change, and it felt like the same small, worried sigh. Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett — A Closer Reading sits beside it now, a gentler echo.