van der Post

Eastside Road, November 21, 2012—

I AM NOT READING enough these days; no question about it. It's mostly because I have been writing and traveling. Both occupations require more energy than they used to, both physical and mental energy; and lately both occupations have also more busily filled those parts of the mind that seem increasingly necessarily at rest, or at least relatively untroubled, if I'm to attend to reading.

Like too many of us I typically read a few minutes at bedtime, when one's least likely to profit from it. Bedtime reading is an exercise in winding down. I'm tempted, in fact, to liken it to end of life, a time for relinquishing mental and physical exercise in preparation for the long sleep. Lately I've adopted the habit of reading in a foreign language at bedtime, and reading without a dictionary. I don't care if I don't fully understand the material; I'm reading for a different purpose. That's an injustice to the book and its author, of course, but I can always return to it with attentions more fully awake, perhaps in translation. Currently I'm reading a biography of one of my childhood favorite authors, Hendrik Willem van Loon. I've learned a few things from it, and one of these days I may even report on them here. But that's not today's purpose.

Instead, let me report on a book read last week, half of it on the flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles. Reading on airplanes, for me, is akin to reading in bed: I tend to forget completely what I've read as soon as the plane has landed. Sometimes, as soon as I've turned a page or two. Not this time, though, partly because I'd begun the book — at bedtime — a day or two before.

I found the book, Laurens van der Post's Venture to the Interior, at Yarra Cottage Books, a small promising used-book shop in Warrandyte, a bucolic suburb of Melbourne on the banks of the Yarra River. A trail runs along the bank there, several miles long. In mid-spring the trees are in full foliage, eucalypts, oaks, Monterey pines, shading the decomposed granite sandy path. The countryside here is so pretty it's been the subject of a number of landscape painters: at one point a stele commemorates one of them, Clara Southern, with a reproduction of one of her paintings.

Clara Southern: Evensong, ca. 1900-1914, oil on canvas

The stele reads

Clara Southern, or 'Panther' as she was known, was described as a tall lithe beauty, with reddish fair hair. In 1905, she married local miner, John Arthur Flinn and settled at 'Blythe Bank', North Warrandyte on The Hill' above the Warrandyte township.
This work was painted from the high vantage point of 'The Hill', and depicts a number of the buildings along Yarra Street, including on the far left, the old bakery, which is still operational today. The view is westward across the Yarra River towards the hills of Templestowe.

That bakery — you'll have to take my word for it; my photo of the painting, reproduced in enameled steel or aluminum on the stele, and suffering from lens flare here — is to the left of the two sharply pitched shed roofs, which mark the location of Yarra Cottage Books.

The shop reminded me of those of fifty years ago, a series of small rooms with crowded shelves, well enough organized but better suited to browsing than go-and-get shopping (except that my age and size make the necessary floor-crouching difficult between close-set bookshelves). I looked for a copy of something by Patrick Leigh Fermor to give to my brother, who's done his share of global wandering, but found only the new biography, which I must hasten to obtain. (It was far too large to carry on the airplane). What I did find was Venture to the Interior, in a dog-eared Penguin paperbound that must be thirty years old.

What a book! The country it describes is a long way from the green Yarra valley in Victoria, as the "Interior" of the title is Nyasaland, in central Africa. And the "venture" — whose exact purpose is a little mysterious (causing me to wonder at times just who van der Post may have actually been venturing for) — involved flights very different from mine. I have made one long flight on a propellor-driven passenger airplane, from Bucharest to Moscow thirty years ago, and I know the wallow and the drone: but the flight van der Post describes, through Sahara sandstorms in the late 1940s, was a very different matter. Reading about it made today's flights seem comfortable, even though the food and drinks are considerably more Spartan.

At the bookshop the first sentence to catch my eye sold me the book:

One of the most striking features of the desperate age in which we live is its genius for finding good reasons for doing bad things.

Fourteen or fifteen times, in the course of reading these two hundred pages, I found myself ticking off paragraphs in the margins. Van der Post is writing about the end of colonialism, the tension between the "races," the recovery from the brutalities of World War II, the difference between the sexes; about revenge and forgiveness, the nature of Time, the fugitive transactionality of morality, the melancholia resulting from "education."

He writes about the nature of the nomad and the tyranny of place. He writes about consciousness and knowledge:

And yet there is a way of knowing which is at once underneath and above consciousness of knowing. There is a way in which the collective knowledge of mankind expresses itself, for the finite individual, through mere daily living: a way in which life itself is sheer knowing. So life is to me, anyway; a mystery in all its essentials, a complete and utter mystery. I accept it even gladly as such because the acceptance keeps me humble, keeps me in my little place; prevents me, as we used to say in the recent war, from being caught too far out of position.

Venture to the Interior is narrative and suspense narrative; it is travel and historical travel; it is psychology and social philosophy. It seems to me to be imperative reading for our time, for the age of Taliban and American Exceptionalism, as it was the product of its time, the age of fascism and the Third Reich. What a rich and confounding world this is, that offers such collective organized dismay, in the embrace of such transcendent natural beauty!

The Yarra at Warrandyte

Road trip

Eastside Road, April 25, 2012—

AS THE PREVIOUS POST indicates, we were down in Pasadena over the weekend, seeing plays at A Noise Within. Much as we like the company, and (for the most part) their productions, I look forward to the trip itself almost more. As Gertrude Stein notes someplace, Plays and Landscape have an elective affinity. (Actually what she says, as I recall, is that a landscape has no purpose other than providing a site for landscape or for battle: but cut me a little slack here.)

If I am religious, my religion is Landscape. Chekhov explains this better than I can:

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and It will sound as indifferently and motonously when we are all not more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings — the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky — Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

—Chekhov: The Lady with the Dog, quoted in Janet Malcolm: Reading Chekhov

I found Malcolm's book interesting and useful. It combines, or better perhaps merges, literary criticism, travel, and first-person essay, all genres dear to my heart; and if she occasionally slips into a snippy mood she does not dwell there: with Chekhov at one's side, it's hard to remain scornful or overweening for more than a moment.

The quoted passage stands on the very first page of Reading Chekhov. Malcolm has gone to Yalta to visit Chekhov's home, and the seaside cottage that was his getaway; and what better way to set the scene than through the master's own words? She soon flashes back to earlier stages of her literary pilgrimage, visits to Petersburg and Moscow; and in those pages we're reminded that Janet Malcolm is a city-dweller; she doesn't take to the countryside as easily, I think, as Chekhov does. She writes about the stories more than the plays; she writes well about the letters (and quotes liberally from them, making me hunger to read them soon). She writes about Chekhov's rather surprising journey to Sakhalin, and the report he wrote on the lunatic asylum there.

I read Reading Chekhov quickly, in a borrowed copy no longer at hand — just as well, perhaps: I don't really want to write extensively about it here. Partly because of the speed, because it was read late at night in hotel rooms, and while seeing plays and driving through landscape, the book has gone into a vague and rather mysterious corner in the theater of my memory, taking on the quality of something W.G. Sebald might have written. I didn't take any notes while reading it, either: but I remember being particularly impressed with Chekhov's letter to his brother, urging him to put himself in order, and particularly to get some culture: to live well on this earth, among civil human society, one needs culture, which includes, Chekhov makes clear, discipline, kindness, modesty, and truthfulness.

You have only one failing, and the falseness of your position, and your unhappiness and your catarrh of the bowels are all due to it. That is your utter lack of culture. Forgive me, please, but veritas magis amicitia. You see, life has its conditions. In order to feel comfortable among educated people, to be at home and happy with them, one must be cultured to a certain extent…

—Malcolm, Reading Chekhov, p. 97 (I find the passage on Google Books)

Malcolm traveled by air and rail: Chekhov crossed Siberia, she points out, for the most part, in horse-drawn conveyances, on rutted and muddy roads. For most of us, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, landscape is experienced through glass and at speed. What Stein knew is that landscape divulges its content and its meaning only at slower tempo. Among the many differences between live theater and film or television perhaps the least discussed is tempo: theater is slower, even when it is punctuated, as are battles, by moments of violence and the violence of haste. I've noted here before that Bruckner's music is best appreciated by those who are accustomed to long walks: like Schubert, like Sibelius, Bruckner was accustomed to them.

(Mozart was I think not much of a walker; his awareness of landscape was formed during his childhood from the view of it receding from a coach moving as swiftly as possible — perhaps not very swiftly — as he sat next to his valet-companion on the rear seat, making up stories of reverse-motion worlds. I think that may be why his music often seems to have been conceived from the final moment forward to the beginning, guaranteeing all threads to converge and resolve at the conclusion.)

Looking north from Mission San Juan Bautista

As we like to do, we drove to Los Angeles with a friend, stopping to see another friend in Ojai on the way down, and dawdling in search of wildflowers on the way back. We stopped at Missions, too: I have my favorite sites and don't like to miss a chance to revisit them. One is at the edge of the little rose garden at Mission San Juan Bautista, where you gaze out over a flat expanse of farmland toward the eastern scarp of the San Andreas Fault. Last Thursday that view was spoiled a little bit by the extensive sheets of plastic covering the soil, which was probably being fumigated — one doesn't like to think about such modern industrial compromises with the higher aims of our existence, but there it is; and since it is there, it's good to be reminded of it.

(Others will be similarly discouraged by the thought of the hundreds of bodies in unmarked graves, just inside the wall in the "Indian Cemetery." It's politically fashionable to insist that the Mission movement was nothing but evil, exploitive, even cynical. You'll perhaps not be surprised to hear I think that's a bit simplistic: not only autre temps, autre moeurs, but also other truths, I believe.)

Then there was Ojai. Its valley was an inspiration, I believe, for James Nordhoff's Shangri-la; the writer lived in the Ojai valley. It is one huge citrus grove — citrus and avocados — relieved from time to time by the rather palatial residences of the rich who live quietly at the foot of the east-west range protecting them from north winds.

Churchill Orchard, Ojai

Malcolm points out that Chekhov writes of a Nature quite inflected by human activity; the natural beauty he contemplates is not wilderness but horticulture; and on this road trip I come to realize once again that I agree. The reassurance of the everpresent beauty — justice, even, I would say — derives from an intersection of natural context and human occupation or use. An appropriate use, of course, at the natural tempo and scale deriving from the natural energies: wind, water, gravity, animal and manpower.

I can never drive through California's Central Valley near Williams without thinking of old photographs my grandfather had, of enormous steam tractors big as small houses, standing out in mown and threshed wheatfields: they took the place of huge teams of horses, but likely moved not much faster. They opened a door, though, with the straining pull of an insatiable demand for ever faster, cheaper energy; and the result has been a widening of the gap between rich and poor, and a terrible cost to the environment. Demand for cheap labor, always related to willingness to exploit others for one's own comfort, always seems to result in some form of slavery.

The question arises inevitably on visiting California's Missions. We stopped at Mission San Miguel on the way back, after crossing the magnificent Figueroa Mountain in search of wildflowers — the blue and gold of lupine and poppy against sandstone and serpentine, enhanced by eddies of Kurosawa mists on an early afternoon troubled by changeable weather. The San Miguel sanctuary was badly damaged by the San Simeon earthquake of a few years ago, but the community and its parish rallied and somehow raised the funds necessary for a fine restoration. The cloister — wrong word, I'm sure, for the interior courtyard, originally little more than a stockyard — is nicely and modestly gardened; the cells left pretty much in the dark, furnished with the rawhide beds and crude tables and chairs.

Clearly the local population was worked in the vineyards and orchards, at the presses and ovens; and one can only wonder what they thought as they sat on the adobe floor of the church listening to sermons in Spanish and masses in Latin. The mental effort must have matched the physical, and they must have known they lived in a time of utter change, plunged from a preliterate hunter-gatherer society into one organized through the printed word, monetary exchange, and travel across great distances. I think California's Missions provide a glimpse into the Russian feudalism still living memory but soon to change utterly in Chekhov's day. I think, too, that we are utterly misled by sentiment when we try to apply contemporary concepts of social justice, themselves often based greatly on suspect assumptions of material needs and available energies, to a world now perhaps hopelessly distant from our ken.
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Mission San Antonio

We drove from Bradley, on Highway 101, westerly through Lockwood to Mission San Antonio, one of the most isolated of the Missions. Much of the way we were driving through Fort Hunter Liggett, whose target ranges and airstrips are scattered discreetly among stately oaks in a broad, tranquil valley. The Mission itself is changed since I was last there, say twelve years ago. The Franciscans left, we were told; they'd pretty much let the place go to nature; Dominicans have taken over, the place is cleaned up, it's made available to groups for retreats, and Mass is again celebrated every Sunday for a local parish of three hundred souls or so.

The calla lilies were still standing in vases at the front of the sanctuary, their perfume mingling with that of candles and incense. God knows I am no Catholic, nor Christian either: but I respect the better instincts of those who are, and appreciate their places of gathering in devotion to the forces they think determine their nature and destiny. As I learned in my first week of college, in a required course on religion (I'd been sent to a Christian college in Los Angeles):

Religion is the serious and social attitude of individuals or communities toward the power or powers which they conceive as having ultimate control over their interests and destinies.

—James Bisset Pratt, The Religious Consciousness, page 2

From there we drove on to King City, where a county park features an interesting museum of local agriculture whose relics reminded me once again of my grandparents and great-grandparents; and then northeasterly to Highway 25, which runs north through the valley of the San Andreas Fault toward Hollister. This valley can not be photographed to any advantage; its physical impact on the visitor is spatial more than visual. The road runs between parallel ridges, the Pinnacles on the west, the mercury-bearing San Idria on the right. Apart from the asphalt the only human evidence is fencing and the occasional farmstead. The fields are grazed, of course; one wonders what the grasses would have been before cattle were introduced nearly two hundred years ago.

Lichen-encrusted oak off Highway 25 (photo: March 2011)

When we entered Cold Creek Tavern on the Cuesta pass outside Santa Barbara, at 11:30, we were the only customers; when we left the place was nearly full. Twenty minutes later, when we left Highway Highway 154 to drive along Armour Canyon Road toward Figueroa Mountain Road, we were blissfully alone. We saw one or two cars on the mountain road. We saw none on the road from Bradley to Mission San Antonio, except for one slow tank truck whose driver obligingly signalled us to overtake him. We saw none on Highway 25. It continues to amaze me that on leaving the busy highways one can be alone for hours on these California back roads, even today, even after all the publicity their pleasures have produced.

Many more photographs from this road trip can be found here.

cultiver le jardin…

Excellenz von Schubert

YES, VOLTAIRE. It's from the close of Candide — now where did I put that book? — describing the moment when the eponymous hero of the book, finally disillusioned, gives up his quest for philosophy, turns his back on his tedious mentor Pangloss and his tedium… but let Voltaire tell it:

“Pangloss disait quelquefois à Candide: ‘Tous les événements sont enchaînés dans le meilleur des mondes possibles; car enfin, si vous n’aviez pas été chassé d’un beau château à grands coups de pied dans le derrière pour l’amour de Mlle Cunégonde, si vous n’aviez pas été mis à l’Inquisition, si vous n’aviez pas couru l’Amérique à pied, si vous n’aviez pas donné un bon coup d’épée au baron, si vous n’aviez pas perdu tous vos moutons du bon pays d’Eldorado, vous ne mangeriez pas ici des cédrats confits et des pistaches.’

‘Cela est bien dit,’ répondit Candide, ‘mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’”

Pangloss frequently told Candide: 'everything's connected in this best of all possible worlds; for finally, if you hadn't been chased from a beautiful chateau with considerable kicks on your behind for the love of Mlle Cunégonde, if you hadn't been sent to the Inquisition, if you hadn't run through America on foot, if you hadn't given a good sword-slap to the baron, if you hadn't lost all your sheep in that fine country of Eldorado, you wouldn't be here eating pistachios and candied citron.'

'All very well said,' replied Candide, 'but we must cultivate our garden.'

Voltaire wasn't talking about a garden of his own, whether in Switzerland or France. Wikipedia provides a pretty good take on the quote (I recommend the entire entry, and that on Voltaire):

The conclusion of the novella, in which Candide finally dismisses his tutor's optimism, leaves unresolved what philosophy the protagonist is to accept in its stead. This element of Candide has been written about voluminously, perhaps above all others. The conclusion is enigmatic and its analysis is contentious.

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self-portrait, San José

WE SPENT THE WEEKEND in the improbable city of San José, which is greatly changed in the last forty years. (The addition of the acute accent to its name is one of those changes.) With over a million inhabitants it is now California's third city (after Los Angeles and San Diego), and the heart of the city, where we spent most of our time, is an odd survival of the old architecture and street-grid in the midst — well, there is no "midst" here; the city reminds me of Houston, where empty office-skyscrapers thrust up from blocks of bungalows in a wide-spread scatter fully dependent on the automobile.

We were there to attend the state finals in the mock trial competition organized by the Constitutional Rights Foundation. Our grandson Henry was participating, his high school (Laytonville) having won the Mendocino county competition.

We found the trials absorbing, Lindsey and I. We watched four of them, Laytonville arguing for the prosecution twice and the defense twice; and then a fifth one, in which Hillsdale High (San Mateo county) bested the San Francisco School of Performing Arts to win the state. (The national competition is set for May 6-8 in Philadelphia.)

Each high school fields two teams, for defense and prosecution, enacting a single murder case, the details of which are scripted but the arguments of which are apparently left to the teams. A real judge presides; the "jury" comprises a number of legal professionals who score each team member as to effectiveness. (The judge's decision is immaterial to the final rating of the student legal teams.)

There's a good deal of theater in all this, of course: the drama inherent in any courtroom scene, and that of the students as they learn, individually and as a team, from their mistakes and from their opponents; as they respond to completely different styles of questions from the judges; as they meet, best, or fail the crises developing from all these courtroom interactions.

To me, though, the greatest dimension of this theater was the dialectic of Laytonville and San José. Laytonville is an unincorporated community of a thousand souls, an hour's drive from the county seat of Ukiah. Our son and his wife run the local feed store, help out with the rodeo, and interact with much of the community. "I'm comfortable there," he says, "because it's the only place I've seen that's like Berkeley" — the Berkeley of the 1960s and '70s, he means — "all kinds of people, all of them interesting, all of them respecting one another's privacy."

Maybe that shouldn't be in attributive quotes; maybe I'm writing my own observation. Laytonville's citizens seem a deceptive lot, rustic and isolated but intelligent and quirky. The highschool kids are plugged into the world, of course, fiercely tap-tap-tapping at their cellphones, Facebooking and Tweeting. But the difference between their demeanor and that of their first opponents, from Marin county, seemed to speak a grand subject. Marin county per capita income is over $90,000; Mendocino's, and Laytonville's, is less than $20,000. The Marin kids, from Tamalpais High, came out strong, assertive, composed, confident; Laytonville, prosecuting a very weak case, struggled to find their footing.

Affluence, security, confidence: these are no doubt wonderful things, but I'm not sure they necessarily make good citizens, particularly in the context of a society that seems to overvalue individualism and commodity. The Laytonville kids can garden and hunt, ride and build. They use and enjoy the Internet, but for them I think real community trumps virtual community. They're competent and helpful, and my money's on them in case of catastrophe; I'm not sure the complex global community of banking, law, and marketing can survive as well.

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RETURNED SUNDAY NIGHT to Eastside Road, we entertained eight or ten friends with white wine, Alsatian onion tarts, Lindsey's absolutely delicious Savarin, and sight-readings of two of Gertrude Stein's little plays: What Happened a Play and Ladies Voices. Stein's plays, as I've written elsewhere,

…are famously overheard conversation, but they have an integrity, stylistically and theatrically, that comes from a single observer's point of view (far-reachingly intelligent though it be), filtered through a single writer's editorial and expressive technique.

I've always imagined those overheard conversations took place among settings exactly like Sunday evening's, gatherings of old friends and new, pleasingly fed and judiciously lubricated, comfortably seated and sheltered; and it doesn't hurt that we're in the country; it's quiet outside; and you can see the stars.

A gathering like this is something of a garden, I think. A courtroom is not; a courtroom is an arena. Stein writes somewhere that landscapes are useful settings for two purposes, battles and plays; but there are landscape plays and drawing-room plays, and I think her early short plays fall into the latter category. (Four Saints in Three Acts manages to contain drawing-room theater within a landscape play.) The comedy some of us first enjoy in Stein's theater comes from the apparent first-level non-consequence of these Cubistly juxtaposed overheard lines; the fascination some of us go on to enjoy, to contemplate and consider, comes from the resonance that arises from these lines and their very "meaninglessness," and that grows and enlarges, dissolving our linear and literal response to them in a greater, less specific, more timeless landscape of sound and society.

The landscape of downtown San José hesitates between old and new, always cluttered with wires, signs, and lines; it's almost unvaryingly hardend by pavement, glass, concrete; and the flow of its visible energies is herky-jerky, responding to the tyranny of stoplights for the motors first, pedestrians only secondly. There are of course a number of vacant storefronts. Restaurants, bars, and cafés tend toward the cheap and easy. The Peet's we found did make a decent, individualized cappuccino and was playing Mozart, but it took an humble place away from the main streets where the corporate-scaled faux-village St•rb•cks prevail.

There's a confusion in such a landscape, a disagreement of place and purpose, a disorder of clutter and irrelevance; a confusion that can't help but influence the sensibilities of its citizens. There's a lot of stuff there, but not that much There, as Stein might say. I think the natural, perhaps the normal mental response to such confusion is a shut-down, a turn-off, contrasting with the continual-onward, the opening-outward I feel on reading Stein, on conversing with friends, on hearing the birds and contemplating the stars and the garden.

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A PHONE CALL from the north, yesterday, got me to thinking about the instrumental extensions at the end of sung phrases of Homer. The singing of Homer is perhaps an arcane subject, but it fed right into the weekend's contemplations. Homer, and the Greek poets who followed him, composed his work; there seems to have been no distinction between "poetry" and music. Ancient Greek was an inflected language in more ways than one: melody — the contrasts and connections of pitches articulated the lines as much as did rhythm — those of the quantities, the lengths, of the syllables.

As my Corvallis friend sings it, Homer's Greek is insinuating, mesmerizing, constantly forward-spinning. The mind can only deal with so much of this rich texture of voice, sound, language, meaning, narration. At the end of certain sections, then, the voice falls silent for a few moments, and the accompanying harp extends the line, giving the singer's voice and the listener's mind a bit of rest.

At least that's what I think the purpose of this extension is. But what is the resulting effect? It lies in what's meant by the expression "letting something sink in," allowing time for external functions, outside the intentionality of the singer and the hearer, to make their own little adjustments to context; to configure — sounds, rhythms, meanings — within a kind of perceptible landscape.

I believe that language, meaning, narration, and music were originally inseparable, like self and society. Homer's Iliad is tragic for its record of war, violence on both an individual and a societal level: but in that degree the tragedy's trivial, compared to that of its example of the devolution of thought and language from a position of prayer and praise toward one of argument and persuasion.

Well: all this in my garden this sunny Tuesday. I think when Candide turns to his garden it's to give his mind time to settle. I think you gentle reader for letting me wander here in mine.

(There's an interesting page about singing Homeric Greek here; on it is a link to a performance of Demodokos' song about Ares and Aphrodite. My Corvallis friend says it's pretty good; it sounds a little rushed to me.)

Mountains

a FRIEND WRITES (well, actually a grandson)

One of the things I love so much about mountains is how much character they have, even though they are just geological formations. It's so strange how we can recognize different mountains just by glancing at them, while it would be much harder to do so for rivers, deserts, plains...

Mountains are events; rivers, deserts, and plains are processes, I think. Of course when you're actually climbing the mountain it's a process: but when you see it from a distance it's an object, an event at most.

Rivers of course are fluid and dynamic; even an apparently quiet one has great force. (Think of Charles Ives's Housatonic at Stockbridge.) Deserts and plains and broad river-valleys, like the one here with Eastside Road at its margin, are processes; they invite our motion as participant; one wants to move within them, to explore or, better, experience. But mountains are ambivalent: to an extent (and an extent that varies from one person to the next!) they invite our active participation; at the same time they warn us of their difficulties and dangers.

I haven't explored (!) the history of mountaineering; it's never been a subject of great interest to me. But my understanding is that it's a relatively recent history, at least within my eurocentric concept of history. It seems to date from about the time of the Enlightenment, when the spirit of scientific exploration, the advent of greater leisure (for some), and the suspension of superstitions (formerly regarding mountains and deserts sinister) coincided.

My own interests have tended more to the ambulation than effort, and at this point I doubt I'd have either the strength or the endurance for true mountaineering. There's not much I like better than walking through a landscape; we've walked hundreds of miles, Lindsey and I, contentedly carrying our necessities on our backs while counting on civilization for beds and meals. Climbing seems to me like an imposition of the self on the terrain, though I'm sure the true climber finds it much more a collaboration than an imposition.

Walking is a way of losing ego and mindfulness. Well, that's not quite right: it's a way of being mindfully mindless, to paraphrase John Cage ("purposeful purposelessness"): walking in Dutch forests or the French garrigue conduces full alertness to the pleasures of the environment while enabling near-total suspension of alertness to the physical process. Climbing introduces a new note, the awareness of effort. Ca grimpe, say the French: That's a climb.

Time to go to the gym and prepare a bit more! And then to add one more book to the pile awaiting reading (or in this case re-reading): Réné Daumal's Mount Analogue.