The concept of the cultureforming role of mountains is as much a metaphor as it is a vague mental shortcut, but it is worth using because of its illustrative and expressive character […]. Mountains in the objective sense are not a “cultural fact”; as a phenomenon of nature, they do not actively perform any actions towards man that result in values par excellence cultural. Their persistence is an indifference to man, happening according to the laws of nature, and it is only when they are “discovered,” only when they are “constituted into a concept” – and thus when man adopts some kind of attitude towards them – that they begin to be treated as a culture-creating factor as a result of the peculiar “insinuations” made about them. (Kolbuszewski 1992: X).
What, however, are these references, these “insinuations”? I think they are well represented by two versions of the same quotation from a work by a mountaineer, Wawrzyniec Żuławski [11]. He recalls the moment when he realised that the notes from his expedition had ceased to be merely giving account or individual memory record and had become something more, namely, literature:
Numbers and notes are dry and objective, but when the thought stops for a moment at one of them – a small book with a red cover becomes lively. Numbers and notes take shape, clothe themselves in flesh, speak, narrate – and beyond them the mountains become the inseparable background.(Żuławski 1967: 251 [emphasis added – E. D.]).
In a later edition, probably due to a printing error, the “inseparable background” [in Polish: nieodstępne tło] was changed to “inaccessible background” [in Polish niedostępne tło] (Żuławski 1985: 249). The most recent edition reverts to the version in the first printing (Żuławski 1958: 278) – the mountains again become “inseparable background” (Żuławski 2012: 126). A small alternation (a typo), but how significant, reflecting the complex ambiguity of space in mountain literature.
[11] This is pointed out by Dutka (2018: 130).