Epilogue:
Of Mountain Views
Anyone who has been on a mountain, and many of those who have seen one
only from a distance, will acknowledge it as a spiritual experience.
But that’s a very loose term that has grown looser with use.
One of books that first talked about impact of mountains on the
imagination was Marjorie Hope Nicholson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain
Glory. Nicholson was dean of Smith College in the 30’s and then Chair
of Graduate Studies at Columbia until she retired in 1962. She is
almost an exact contemporary of Edith Hamilton, another grand dame of
the academy, whose books on the ancient world helped retool my mind in
the 1970’s.
I came across Nicholson’s mountain book by accident. Like all graduate
students but more so, I was fascinated by books with a broad scope,
books that made large dramatic--even melodramatic--connections across
centuries and disciplines. I was interested in her book showing how the
literary imagination reacted to the Newton’s mechanical universe, but I
took a squint sideways at her mountain book and remembered the title
and general thesis—that mountains had generally been considered ugly
and forbidding for centuries and had become inspirational in a
particular time and place and for particular reasons.
Years later, I came back to it with great pleasure, as part of a quest
for the shape of my life, which I take to have some bearing on the
lives of generation of young people who fled out of the hills and into
the academy but found the hills would not let them go.
Nicholson draws her polarities, mountain gloom and mountain glory, from
Ruskin’s Modern Painters, though Ruskin was using them to describe
kinds of painting and not a whole esthetic of mountains. Moving easily
across the whole range of literature, but particularly English, she
shows how literary descriptions of mountains fall into a duality, but a
duality weighted heavily on one end.
Both ends of the duality can be traced to ancient authors. The Greeks
caught a glimpse of what Nicholson calls the “vast, the wild, the
dangerous in elemental nature.” Aeschylus could talk about the “sky
piercing rocks” and the “star-neighbored peaks” as if he were really
looking at the Caucasus where he imagined Prometheus chained to a rock
for his defiance of the gods. The Old Testament writers too could
associate the majesty and power with mountains. Sinai shook when Moses
ascended to converse with God.
But beginning with the Romans, the vision shifted. Mountains became an
irritating barrier to be gotten across. Small things came into favor.
The New Testament, in contrast to the Old, praises low and humble
things. Where it does draw on OT images, it does not choose images of
grandeur. Luke for example, when we wants to describe the kingdom of
God, draws on this picture from Isaiah:” Every valley shall be exalted
and every hill and mountain shall be made low.” This attitude persisted
up through the middle ages into the 17th century. Nicholson quotes a
English writer in the 1670’s describing mountains as “Earth’s Dugs,
Risings, Tumors, Blisters . . and warts”
Later, as the Bible became a book I read all the time no matter what
else I was reading, I started noticing how important mountains are in
that book. One standard concordance of the one translation (the NIV)
lists 146 instances of “mount” 154 of “mountain” and another 154
of “mountains” in the plural. The most famous is Sinai, of
course, also known as Horeb. In the Old Testament there is also Mt.
Hor, and Paran, and Nebo, Ebal, and Gerizim, and Gilead, and Tabor, and
Carmel, and Gilboa, and of course Mt. Zion, which is not a real
mountain but stands for the nation of Israel. In the New Testament,
there is mostly the Mount of Olives, rising 200 feet above the
Kidron valley, east of Jerusalem. Jesus spent a lot of time
there alone and with his friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus who lived on
the other side. He came into Jerusalem on a donkey from there. He
prayed there the night before the died, was arrested there and
ascended from there. At least that is what we would infer from the fact
that the disciples walked back from there after they witnessed that
event.
I had no way to put those 454 references into a pattern, but I knew of
a man who could --Northrup Frye, who was ordained in the United
Church of Canada in 1936 and then became famous as the author of
seminal works of literary criticism, including Anatomy of Criticism. He
has written two books on the Bible, and one of them has a chapter
of mountains. In fact, that chapter talks mostly about ladders
and stairs, but the point is that verticality is a strong theme
in the Bible and radiates out from there into all of Western
Literature. The ancients, according to Frye, conceived of an axis
mundi, a vertical line running from the top to the bottom of the
Cosmos. Along this axis, says Frye, “images of ascent are connected
with the intensifying of consciousness and images of descent with the
reinforcing of it by other forms of awareness, such as fantasy or
dream” (151).
The primary image Frye chooses is not Sinai, nor Calvary, or the Mount
of Olives, but Jacob’s dream of a ladder in Genesis 28. In that story,
the ladder’s purpose is not for Jacob to climb up but for the angels to
come down, but more generally, made-made structures mimic mountains by
which one hopes to ascend toward the gods. One hopes, that is, to
intensify consciousness. The Egyptian pyramid and the
Mesopotamian ziggurat had this purpose.
Frye, who seems to have read everything and forgotten nothing, dances
outward from the Bible, festooning every step with literary references.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, both the Purgatorio and the Paradiseo are
ascents from the low point reached in the Inferno. T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt
Norton,” the second of the Four Quartets is, says Frye, all about
the axis mundi which begins in the stars, crosses Time at the “still
point of the turning world” (which is Christ) and ends in the London
subways and Homer’s Hades. Yeats called his two greatest
collections The Winding Stair and The Tower and even lived for a time
in a tower with a winding staircase. Joyce Finnegan’s Wake is based on
a ballad of a hod-carrier who falls off a ladder and dies but
comes to life at his wake to demand a share of the whiskey
Writing about Meso-American structures, the architectural critic,
Vincent Scully, makes much the same point in his monumental book,
Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, where he says:
Manmade pyramids echoes those of the sacred mountains still and
help them along, whether at Walpi on First Mesa or Mount Alban in
Oaxaca. In return the human structures themselves take on enormous
power; they resonate to the horizon. The whole vast landscape, the
whole structure of the world, which human beings from their dawn of
their consciousness probably feared might mean nothing at all is made
to mean something (14).
In the case of temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan, as at the
ziggurat, priests lived at the top and offered human sacrifice, though
Frye does not bring that up. The tower of Babel is an ironic
counterpoint to this desire for ascent. Reach for the divine, that
story says, but do not grow confident that you will succeed.
Two points might easily be drawn from this collection of lore, one
personal and one national. Begin with the national. The image of
verticality that everyone has carried in their heads since September
11, 2001, is the World Trade Towers in New York City. Scully,
writing ten years before they were attacked, has marvelous things
to say about them and about New York architecture:
In New York, the rising spires of the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan
were finally invaded by the flat slabs of the International Style, of
which Chase Manhattan Bank was the first. These instantly reduced the
scale and quelled the wonderfully competitive action of the earlier
towers. The whole pyramidal grouping of spires began to die. The
tall but inert twin chunks of the World Trade Center seemed to kill the
whole thing off at last. So big and dead were they that all the
dynamic interrelationship of the earlier buildings came to seem
lilliputian, inconsequential in scale” (3).
Scully credits some of the later Trade Center buildings for putting the
Towers back into a more graceful pyramidal context, but Islamic
fundamentalists were unimpressed and flew airplanes into them anyway.
The towers took eleven years to build and only about 90 minutes to
destroy. The people who built them, notably Nelson Rockefeller, who was
Governor of New York at the time when they were begun in 1966,
perhaps did think they were ascending to the gods on ladder of trade,
that is, of money. When they went down, New York intellectuals
with loosely developed sense of patriotism took some delight in
comparing them to the tower of Babel, seeing them as an act of national
pride, and justly fallen, as the Tower was in Genesis. These cautions
have been cast to the wind as we lay the plans for replacement towers
that will be higher than the old ones, in fact, the highest structures
in the world. Happily, the project seems bogged down at this point.
Speaking more personally, all of us can build our own modest structures
reaching toward whatever gods we know. Some of those structures
will be made of words—as this one is. Some of us will find it
easier than others to be mindful of what happened to the Hebrew
citizens who tried to build too high, but all of us can intensify
whatever consciousness we were given. The axis mundi runs through
us on its way to connect the
dark underworld with the mind of God.