Mountain Gloom And Mountain Glory Book

I grabbed this book because it raised a question I had not known existed before. Apparently in English humanities the appearance of mountains, and grand nature in general, was not really a positive until the Romantic period. Taking its name more from ruins than from any clear knowledge of the ancient world, the Romantics began to find pleasure in topics once too grim to mention - the wild, the graveyard, the phantasm, and the fancy... Apparently there was a change in attitudes of writers towards mountains that perfectly epitomizes the individuality that the Romantics memorialized into their culture. Before them, people mentioned mountains as ominous, dreaded wilderness, the unapproachable, and hardly the inspiration icons they are to us.

This book was written in the early 50s, a time when a student of poetry knew a whole lot about a lot fewer poets, and shared that knowledge with most of their peers. Something quite different today... more poets means more diversity, more isolation, and more specialities, and a lot less 'common' knowledge. The change in the reputation of mountains is an interesting precursory metaphor. As the individual began to take center stage in the cosmic order, so too the praises for remoteness, and the significance of one's own view becomes more celebrated than the discussion of what geography was more suitable for the soul.

It was a fast read, I skimmed mostly, with lots of quotes from classic poets, but probably too stuffy for those who don't have any questions about whether nature is a source of inspiration or degradation in their life. I found the change fascinating, and that is one of the author's points... that we take our era's perspective as a given, and that reveals profound bias and blindspots that rule our 'modern' lives as much now as it did those living of the past... an apt topic for a woman in academia in the 1950s I'd venture to guess.

It makes it clear that this change in attitude was a cultural fact of English literature... if only because in the North before things like plastic, the mountains could easily kill you. It acknowledges that other cultures, in warmer climes, made their way to the tops of mountains in order to commune, and makes a fascinating point that Christian thought seems to have strongly introduced a disenchantment with mountains. Even though it is the partial offshoot of a culture that had its own holy mountain, mountains became purely virtualized metaphor for problems in the development of the new faith, as emblems of struggle and arrogance, but never a desirable place to admire or have a spiritual experience... not until well after the earliest Renaissance weirdos began to enter the record, willing to admit they are moved by taking the airs for leisure.

In any case, the book makes it perfectly clear that culture is constantly changing even when it feels it is standing still, that the intellectual present is nothing like the past, even if it hangs on that way via imagination, like a sloth hangs onto a tree branch... and has made strides towards a better appreciation of life, a welcome perspective at any time.