The philosophy of the mountain by Francesco Tomatis

The book is written at times in an academic manner, at times with polished literary acrobatics, and in some places it stumbles. On the whole, though, I admit I found it enjoyable, stimulating I would say, absolutely full of interesting ideas.

Developing these themes is nothing new. We find it in many writers, religious figures, philosophers and mountaineers all over the world.

The most recent example is the publication of the book “Filosofia della Montagna” (Philosophy of the Mountain) by Francesco Tomatis.

Like many of you, yours truly also bought the book by the Philosopher from Carrù. A sharp young fellow, a hermeneutic little rascal, a juggler of words, a walker of thought. For a few days… I let the book call to me from the shelf where I had absent-mindedly put it down. Then all of a sudden, driven by an unquenchable thirst, I decide to cancel out space and time.

Intent on crumpling both its paper substance and the more ethereal one of theorising about mountains, I pick up "Filosofia della montagna" and drink… I drink until I have quenched that thirst for thought that had struck me out of the blue.

The book is written at times in an academic manner, at times with polished literary acrobatics, and in some places it stumbles. On the whole, though, I admit I found it enjoyable, stimulating I would say, absolutely full of interesting ideas. The attentive reader senses, in Tomatis's book, a new effort that is very much present among men, and among the philosophers of our time: while unable to escape the inextricable metaphysical cage of “thinking about thought”, to attempt, subtly, the new pragmatic approach of Eastern philosophy.

Here, precisely, is the chapter in question, which unfolds from page 77 of the 2005 Bompiani edition: "In cammino verso il pensare" (On the way to thinking).

Without neglecting the aspect of the ascent, Tomatis sets walking through life alongside walking in the mountains. Delicately among the words, with that sly manner of his, the philosopher offers twisted architectures of words and concepts vaguely Eckhartian. At times poetic, he allows himself redundant musical and rhythmic licences.

"But if one day the beauty of a dancing gait appears to you, if you follow a trail because you are enchanted, or discover a route that you yourself had uncertainly skirted, the slowness of the walk will take you far, to meet places, people, dimensions, ideas you would never have managed to approach. Then you will have learnt by experience that it is only by walking with their own heads that women and men live and survive, that they know how to seek their own personal path. They exist concretely, because they think of what may await them at every weighed breath."…

Walking as “the doing that teaches”, and then the breath, how important it is we mountain folk know well, we who often make it a question of the “thickness of the air”. For that thin air forces us into laboured breathing. We climbers feel it, measuring with every step the depth of our physical and inner yearning.

Finally we reach paragraph nine, quoted here to give substance to this look at the subject and to spur you on to read the whole book:

"Let us therefore exhort one another with Saint Paul to live spiritually, in walking, dancing, thinking: - if we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit - (Gal 5, 25). Walking is thinking, thinking is walking … - … only walking thoughts have warmth - (Friedrich Nietzsche) …"

Tomatis's learned quotations close a chapter that proves decidedly stimulating. Probably the book is not accessible to everyone, but probably it is not as abstruse as all that either, which is what I myself thought at first glance.

The art of walking while thinking and also, should it only be thinking about walking, seems to take us back to an archetypal, primitive, original form of existence by which "inertia motum" cannot but take us back to the genesis of creation, to the vital breath of creation, to the deus ex machina. The return to the father through the action of primordial motion… And should one not wish to speak of a “Revealed Father”, then at least allow me to believe in a “Mother Nature” that exists, that can be perceived and that is alive.