"It is our sacred duty to know we are alive at all times." What an inspirational notion! How seemingly impossible a task! And yet, is it not the need to feel alive that informs much of our apparently insatiable hunger for experience? Even our cleaning-lady, musing on the relentless passing of time, urges us to make best use of our allotted span: "Il faut profiter, il faut profiter!" And how? By accumulating "experiences", one supposes. Personally, I am highly susceptible to, but deeply sceptical of, the tick-list approach to life. Instinctively one feels that the quality of experience must be more significant than the quantity. Yet it cannot be denied that there are some times when one feels infinitely more alive than at others; when intensity of experience makes the sense of one's own existence so much more immediate. It is these moments that leave such a particularly vivid trace in the memory. Mountain days, for example, are very liable to leave such a deeper imprint in the memory. Like my recent trip to the Southern Highlands, for instance...

In late January, dawn is a laggard riser. But it was already getting properly light as we headed up Loch Lomondside. We were clearly too late for a proper winter start as Ben Lomond and its satellites emerged from the grey. It was a damp, mildish winter's day with the wind gusting fitfully out of the southwest. It had snowed earlier in the week, but much of it had melted and only the tops retained a scruffy white topping.
Although the cloud was broken, the forecast was, inevitably, for strengthening wind and increasing rain. My daughter Victoria had met me from the night-train in Glasgow and, although we were too late to catch up with our friends who were off to Ben Nevis, we determined to make the best of the day with an ascent of Beinn Dubhchraig by Tyndrum. Ben Lui would have been the more prestigious summit, but we had plans for the evening and had no desire for a stumbling, boggy hike back to the car in the dark. As it was, we were to encounter bog enough.
We parked the car at Dalrigh. Turning off the engine and stepping out into the Highland air, we were met by the smell on the the damp-peaty breeze. It conjured up a whole world which had lain dormant in the body's own memory. We packed up and set off. After some hesitation, I had decided to leave behind my crampons. Victoria had none and I did not wish to be tempted to go where she might not be able to follow. An error as it turned out. We crossed the River Cononish and headed off alongside the railway line. A train passed, headed for Oban, its two carriages looking toy-like, forlorn even, dwarfed by the vast landscape of moorland and mountain. Crossing the track, we headed across a sodden moss and into the Coille Coire Chuill, a forest of ancient Caledonian pine which follows the banks of the Allt Coire Dubhchraig up towards the mountain. There can hardly be a lovelier sight in the world than a vision of snow-capped hills viewed through a stand of these magnificent trees. It constitutes the concentrated quintessence of Scotland. But we needed to look to each step. The path was scarcely more than a filthy strip of bog. Any over-enthusiastic admiration of the majestic upward sweep of Ben Lui would surely have landed us thigh-deep in the glaur!
We gradually worked our way up through the muck and onto the open hillside. As the track petered out, we continued up through indistinct heather hillocks towards Coire Dubhchraig. By now we were in the cloud, with the wind growing stronger and scotch mist giving way to more persistent bursts of rain. In this shapeless terrain there was no particular point to aim for. We blundered on by compass-bearing. We were beginning to wonder whether there was much point to this exercise, but kept on climbing anyway. Eventually we found ourselves on Beinn Dubhchraig's northern spur. The mountain and our walk now took on a more orderly aspect. Still in the mist, we pushed on up the broad ridge, seeking, as we proceeded, to identify features in the landscape that might help guide us back down. Moss and stone now gave way to snow and treacherous patches of ice. We worked our way up gingerly. Eventually we found ourselves at the frozen lochan on the main ridge, where we took a bearing to the southeast, aiming for the invisible summit of our mountain. Then, perfectly on cue, there was a distinct yellow brightening in the cloud and suddenly we were bathed in sunlight. The last shreds of mist were driven off the rocky summit ahead of us. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. Wind-driven cloud boiled and seethed in the southern corrie, but our way was clear. We hurried on to the summit, but ice made for some tricky going. A party passed us, heading in the opposite direction, proceeding carelessly in their crampons. Still, we had to make the best of it, and by dint of careful route selection and judicious placing of the feet, we made it to the summit. We took a compulsory photograph, but did not linger, as there was no real shelter from the wind and the cloud was closing in again. Very delicately now, we climbed back down the rocks and then trudged on through the snow to the lochan, where we stopped for a bite and a drink. More from bravado than conviction, I mooted that we press on to Ben Oss, Dubhchraig's western sister. But Victoria was adamant. Enough was enough. It was a wise decision. Redescending our route, dealing with the ice was trickier still. Even off the snow, the wind had deep-chilled the moss to the consistency of glass. I fell painfully more than once and the hills rang to my expletives of frustration. The steeper Ben Oss would have been more than awkward under such conditions. We finally made softer ground as we got off the mountain proper. It now remained for us to trog back through the amorphous heather landscape. Failing to find the path, we crossed the deer fence further west. This meant us having to find our own route back through the Caledonian pines - something of a blessing in disguise, as we thus avoided much of the boggy path. At the end of the forest, we crossed the pretty little bridge over the Allt Gleann Auchreoch and made our way across the moss-bog, down along the railway and back to the car.
We learned later that some friends had that same day started early from the same car-park and, equipped with crampons, had done the complete circuit of not only Beinn Dubhchraig and Ben Oss, but also Ben Lui. I felt a brief pang of testosterone envy. But no. There is a place in the mountains for demonstrations of strength and endurance. But we, while breaking no records, had, for a day, gifted ourselves the knowledge of being alive.

My readership comments to the effect that books are a sort of intermediate but appropriate technology which enables us to share vicariously ideas and experience in an infinitely wider context than would ordinarily be permitted by the immediate place and time in which we live. I think that must be right. In my experience, the enjoyment of a book involves above all entering into a relationship with the author - to the point that you can feel you know them and would even like to have them round for dinner. A good prose style is the equivalent of charm, a sort of literary coquetry which draws the reader in. Inevitably some flatter to deceive. Casting around for an example, one name which springs to mind is Simon Schama. Despite his scintillating writing technique, one is left with a sense of being left undernourished - like an overelaborate cake, all whipped cream and too little pastry. A propos, could I have accidentally stumbled over the origin of the word "tart" (in its vulgar sense)?

So, ideally, a book should be well-enough written for you to like the author and want to go on reading to get to know him better, as it were. It should also be nourishing. It should offer some new insight, a certain deeper understanding of the nature of things, an exploration of ideas as yet unconsidered. Ideally, it will be a vehicule to reveal those unseen truths which are inaccessible to our prosaic workaday minds, calling us to a higher place in ourselves. Looking around my shelves I try to pick out authors that would fit in this latter category: T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, D.T. Suzuki, Solzhenitsyn, Aldous Huxley, Goethe, Baudelaire, Joyce, Meister Eckhart, Maurice Nicoll, Hölderlin, Rilke, Dostoyevsky, Melville, er, Proust... but already I'm straying into the area of "would like to have read", rather than "have been strongly influenced by". Not to worry. Isn't there a Sufi saying to the effect that a man whose intellect is stuffed with information, but whose being remains untouched by the reality of the truth is as a donkey carrying a large load of books? The real question we should be asking is not: How shall I find the time and stamina to read all that stuff? The real, urgent question is: How not to be a donkey?

My entire readership of Andy Hartley has commented that reading is a kind of OK second-best to real life when real life is not possible. Wow! So many implications, so little time! The first question which springs to mind is: when and why would real life not be possible? Like it or not, we are in real life all the time - " This is It!". What seems to seperate us from "real life" is a failure of awareness. We forget we are alive. I am convinced that it is our sacred duty to know we are alive at all times, that in the realisation of consciousness lies the true purpose of human existence. This seems easy, but is in fact incredibly hard. Try it. It should be possible to read (even) Proust and at the same time be aware of one's being there reading. I look forward to comments from my readership on their practical experiments in this field.

Sincere inquiry into the question of why we read is likely to prove a salutary experience. At one level it would appear obvious that we read for any number of different reasons: to obtain necessary information, to satisfy intellectual curiosity, to enjoy being entertained, to escape (from life?), to acquire "erudition" etc. etc. At a deeper level, however, I have a sense that is almost an organic function. Reading is food for the associative mind, a necessity for its proper functioning. There are different grades of food in the same way that a horse, say, can eat straw, hay or oats. "Oats" grade reading is what we would have to call, for want of a better expression, serious literature. But in the same way that a horse can founder if it eats oats but is not made to work, so, serious reading without the effort of conscious awareness can lead to intellectual constipation and a separation from real life. Reading should not be an alternative to life, but an enhancer of life. But it requires reading the right books in the right way. Quite a programme!