A thoughtful, quiet journey To a Mountain in Tibet

From The Week of May 27, 2013 Grief is a complex and exquisite emotion. For though it wracks our minds and torments our hearts with its dark and vicious throbbing, constantly and acutely reminding us of what we've lost, it also provides an avenue through which we can explore not only our place in the world, but the very meaning of existence and the good life. It takes us out of our day-to-day existence and compels us to contemplate our lives, our virtues and our sins, our merits and our flaws. And finally, it serves as a kind of memorium for the fallen, a means of acknowledging to them, and to ourselves, the depth of our emotions. Without it, introspection would be a meager force, a tool rarely brought to hand. This Colin Thubron captures well in his cinematic exploration of the Himalayas. After losing his sister to a mountain accident and his parents to old age, Mr. Thubron was a man adrift. But for an Italian girlfriend living in his native England, he possessed no ties to the world, nothing with which to link him to life. And so, as a means of revisiting his father's past, his sister's death and his own belief system, he conceived of a journey to Tibet where he would make himself intimately familiar with Mount Kailash, a 27,000-foot colossus of beautiful lakes and pitiless stone that is sacred to four of the world's prominent faiths. Here, he encounters a people eking out a hard existence at the heart of the world, a people who, despite being rich of faith, have been reduced to life's essentials. Despite their poverty and their scarce resources, these natives persist in this hard land, making pilgrimages to Mount Kailash's most holy sites, many of which are not easily accessed by the young and the fit let alone the aging and the undernourished. Determined to find something here to sooth his soul, Mr. Thubron pushes past the pain and the deprivation to absorb this sacred place and all that it has to offer. Though it has all the hallmarks of another chronicle of an ambitious mountaineer and his adventures conquering the world's peaks, To a Mountain in Tibet is an introspective work of nonfiction that equally captures the beauty and the desolation of the Himalayas. Largely setting aside the tangled politics of the region, Mr. Thubron bears his wounded soul to the reader, inviting him on a journey of self-discovery into a formidable place that most of us will never see. On the way, we learn about the author's father's military service in the area, his childhood in a war-torn Britain and his desire to find some measure of solace for a savaged spirit. But while these emotions are never far from the surface, they are overshadowed by the sheer grandeur of Mount Kailash, a sacred and unsummited mountain that is brought brilliantly to life by Mr. Thubron's descriptions of its walks and its lakes, its rocks and its shrines, all of which convey a profound sense of timeless majesty unimaginable to those of us who live in blander climes. Consequently, Kailash becomes the work's central character, the hub around which the work rotates, its secrets as profound as its claws are sharp. This is not a flawless work. Though Mr. Thubron wields an eloquent pen, his account seems to float largely out of time, existing in a place beyond culture and politics. This may well have been deliberate, an attempt to make the work enduring to the generations who might find solace in it, but it seems as likely to be a simple unwillingness to grapple with such difficult subjects. Moreover, Mr. Thubron teases us with details of his family that he never quite reveals with any specificity. Naturally, it is his prerogative to keep private his own history, but it seems strange to raise the specter of such figures and then to not fill them in. Nonetheless, this is an excellent and emotional trek through icy desolation to find beauty at the heart of the world. It is executed with quiet grace and enduring sensitivity. (3/5 Stars)