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People who like the mountains think they are smarter and cooler than beach people. But they are wrong

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There’s a bit in Donna Tartt’s cult novel The Secret History that’s always bothered me. A group of friends are on their way to an inn in the countryside. The landscape is “veiled and mysterious, silent in the night and fog. This was remote, untraveled land… high and perilous and primitive.” One character volunteers that if she were to buy a house, she would buy one there. She has always, she says, liked the mountains better than the seashore. Another character chimes in to say he’s never had “the slightest bit of interest in the sea,” preferring “broken, wild terrain.” “The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions,” he says. Mountains, we are given to understand, are the sophisticated choice. Beaches are basic—for people on whom subtlety is lost. Tartt isn’t alone in using this dichotomy as a way of revealing something deeper about one’s personality. Look at Game of Thrones—the mountain people are tough

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