2nd Edition, with 9 new drawings by Etel Adnan
Originally published in 1986, Journey to Mount Tamalpais is at once a deep study and a love letter of and to a mountain. A prose essay written with the lyricism and precision of a master poet, Wendell Berry calls it “one of the major works of the ‘spirit of place’ in contemporary literature.”
With a career spanning decades, genres, and nations, Etel Adnan’s contributions to the fields of poetry, painting, philosophy, and journalism are indelible. In Journey to Mount Tamalpais, her alchemical command of language is enhanced by the use of painting and drawing as exploratory tools in a meditative practice of perception—what Omar Berrada in the book’s afterword calls “a form of listening that transfigures the relation between subject and object, that reaches into layers of history buried underground.” Adnan’s encounter with the Mountain, as both its witness and its collaborator, results in this tour de force of ecological, political and poetic expression. Journey to Mount Tamalpais remains one of her most beloved works and a stunning example of her marriage of the visual and literary arts.
Etel Adnan
Praise for Journey to Mount Tamalpais, 2nd Ed.
Etel Adnan… was once asked in a TV Interview to name the most important person she had ever met, and when she answered “A mountain,” she discovered that Tamalpais was at the center of her being. [Journey to Mt. Tamalpais] can be read most accessibly as the story of an experiment, the Perception Workshop, that the author and her artist friends in Mill Valley participated in for some years, “living with a mountain and with people moving with all their senses open, like many radars…”
— Sherry Reinecker, Edge, Japan
This book is an ars poetica at the meeting point of Adnan’s verbal and visual practices. It is a love poem to a mountain in the form of a prose essay. A sustained reflection that strings together journal entries written over a period of 23 years. A meditation on painting and dreaming, on landscape and power, on indigeneity and conquest, on dry volcanoes and overflowing sentiments.
— Omar Berrada, from the afterword to the second edition
Highly original in both content and literary structure, it is a new outlook on the importance of Nature as an element of thinking; one of the major works of the “spirit of place” in contemporary literature. An enlightening journey for those who love the mountain, for those who love Etel, and for those who (like me) love both.
— Wendell Berry
In Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Adnan retreats from the burden of the past, seeking solace in the hills before her: “open wide the earth, shake trees from their roots,” she submits, as she makes her way through numerous returns and crossings… [W]e begin to sense a kind of liberated renewal taking place. Adnan is emancipating herself from the burden of being placeless (or indeed, of many nonplaces), claiming art as the site of her escape and shelter.
— Omar Kholeif, The Poetry Foundation
Adnan finds in the mountain a vital counterpoint to the hubrises of the self. A supreme equalizer of being, it stands as an antipode to our habitual anthropocentrism and self-involvement, humbling us — in the proper sense of humility, with its Latin root in humus, “of the earth” — into recognizing that we are each just one creature among many, a tiny constellation of stardust whose ephemeral existence is no more significant than any other.
— Maria Popova, Brain Pickings