The Quartz Parliament

Via MJH, Robert Macfarlane's short and mercilessly clear essay on writer and climber Jim Perrin, worth quoting at length for its relevance to Team Cat's alpine excursions, and their genesis in the wintery Cascade panoramas visible from Hillside Secondary's homeroom windows:

"Joy, perhaps above all, is a vital concept for Perrin. In 'The Vision of Glory,' he describes climbing Beinn a' Chaoruinn, the Hill of the Rowan, a mountain above Loch Moy. The winter day begins dully, but near the summit, suddenly 'the mist is scoured with speed from the face of the mountain,' and Perrin sees out over the surrounding peaks and corries, 'all glitter and coruscation, shapes of the Mamores beyond a phantasmal ivory gleam.' From this epiphany, the essay develops by way of Wordsworth and Simone Weil, into a meditation on the power of such visionary moments — 'the occasional goings-through into the white world, into the world of light' - to call out a goodness in us. 'Our essential life, the joy-life, is a sequence of these moments: how many of us could count even sixty such?'

Such are the mystical returns which, in Perrin's secular theology, reward those who venture into the high mountains. For Perrin, taking the high ground does not lead one to superiority or righteousness, but to humility. 'I was annihilated,' he writes of an experience on Jacob's Ladder in the Peak District, 'had no existence, simply looked out at the inconceivable beauty of the world that had detached me from any concept of self in order that I might see.'

Discussing the accidie which overwhelmed Wordsworth in the 1840s, Perrin wonders 'what had gone so radically wrong that he could no longer record, as he had once recorded, the radical joy in the commonplace and the everyday around him?' Joy - for Perrin as for Weil - is radical in that it is an improving force, which rinses a person clean of bitterness, and propels them to a contemplation of alternative ways of being. It is an emotion which inhabits the future subjunctive tense: the what-might-be.

There is a popular heresy that a love of nature is a middle-class luxury: budget-Buddhism for the well-off. The ability - this heresy runs - to find landscapes attractive, consoling, or 'heart-exciting' (to borrow Coleridge's fine phrase) is a function of wealth. Only those who have enjoyed an affluent upbringing will be able to discover beauty in the stern curve of a mountain slope, or the great weathers of a coastal sky; or in gentler and more modest abstractions, such as the rise of a moorland horizon, or an arrangement of wet stones on a beach.

It is a heresy to be despised, for it patronises those it pretends to represent, and denies them so much. And it is a heresy which Perrin's life and his writing urgently refuse. His fierce, self-effacing and generous essays investigate a question of enormous importance: how far landscape can help, and has historically helped, to fulfil 'the potential dignity and worth of human consciousness.'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:28 AM