Man(kind) VS. Mountain
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"‘first modem man.” His famous climb of Mt. Ventoux in southern France in the
year 1336 has been told and retold (Petrarch 11-19; Marias 190).2
I must at this point add one more name, that of another famous writer
somewhat out of synch with his age, Michel de Montaigne. Late in the sixteenth
century he made a long, arduous journey from his Bordeaux home across the
Alps to Rome, visiting many a hot spring en route to treat his gallstones (the real
reason for his trip). Though lacking a picturesque descriptive language
(European vernaculars of the day were simply inadequate), he describes rushing
waters, unusual plants and animals, all sharply and appreciatively delineated.
“The mountains, infinitely pleasing,” he called them (Singer).
Now Montaigne, like any good sixteenth-century Frenchman,
appreciated nature modified by mankind over the wilder reaches of the
mountains. The remarkable thing, however, is that he could appreciate both. The
only others sympathetic to the mountains at that time would be the likes of
Conrad Gesner or Benoit Marti of Bern, both Swiss, living their lives amidst the
heights.3
In any event, more typical of his day would be the reaction to
mountains of the French poet Joachim du Bellay (1522-1560). He had to
traverse the Grisons to reach Rome one cold winter. Sonnet 134 of his Regrets
sequence tells his story. He recounts heinous crimes such as matricide, patricide,
treason, and blasphemy, worthy of the most awful punishment. Having to
traverse the Grisons is punishment enough, he decides. Let’s give Du Bellay a
sense of humor, but he remains no partisan of the high wilderness.4
Little change occurred in the seventeenth century. If Bunyan’s
Pilgrim's Progress part 1 (late in the century) gives us the line, "They came to
the Delectable Mountains,” it is a nonexistent, allegorical range never seen by
the English author or anyone else.
Let me inject a curious little sidebar to our story. The following folktale
goes way back, but seemingly was quite perdurable. There were no signs
warning travelers not to approach the heights of Mont Pilatus, a modest peak of
6995 ft. near Geneva. It looks quite innocent today, with a railway and a
walking path up it and a hotel (so European) on top. The natives already knew
better. After all, it was named after its infamous tenant Pontius Pilate, who
would seize any rash intruder, whence he would summarily wind up in hell.
Note that this curious legend is not strictly religious. Religion has indeed strayed
across the border into matters societal. The myth did not locate Pilate on some
remote island or give him an address in an unsavory ghetto in overcrowded Paris
or Rome. It was not their purse monies at stake but their immortal soul, which
they would deservedly lose poking around in areas unfit for mankind. End of
sidebar (Irving, Romance 12).
Jean-Jacques (1712-78) usually gets the major credit for a
revolutionary new outlook, though he was simply the most visible example of
forerunners in a vast outpouring of anti-classical feeling, a cry for individuality,
for the importance of passion, for casting aside restraints, in short, the Age of