The High and the Sublime

No, not what some people appear to see when they are on recreational pharmaceuticals. I’m thinking about a concept that was proposed in English by the art critic, politician, and historian Edmund Burke in the mid 1700s and how it influenced the development of “mountains as tourist attractions” later that century.

As mentioned earlier this week, most people did not seek out places like the Alps or Carpathian Mountains in order to “enjoy” them. Mountains were places to encounter the divine, or to get away from other people for spiritual reasons. They were obsticals, rugged and unfriendly terrain that held lots of dangers, both natural and man-made. Those people who lived in the mountains tended to be insular, clannish, poor, aggressive, and to speak strange dialects. Or they were miners, who were often considered a little uncanny by other people, and who tended to be very independent. Hills were good, but the high mountains did not attract people coming on vacation. Having seen the Alps from the north, in southern Bavaria, they look like fangs, snow-covered even in mid-June, jutting up to block access to anywhere, dangerous. “Eiger” means ogre, and an “Alptraum” or an Alp dream is a nightmare.

Enter the Industrial Revolution, the Romantic Movement, and Burke. In 1757, Edmund Burke (Yes, that Burke) wrote A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. The sublime was something so overwhelming and close to the infinite (or the Infinite) that terror and awe threatened to overpower the human mind and senses. The Romantic Movement, focused as it was on emotion and the power of feelings, as well as on Nature, grabbed the concept. It influenced poetry, the paintings of people like C. D. Friedrich (German) and W. Turner (English). Storms at sea and storms in the mountains became common ways to show the sublime. The eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius in the late 1700s also influenced the idea. Followers of the Romantic movement began going to  places such as the Alps in search of the sublime for themselves. This coincided with the rise of leisure as something people outside the upper classes and nobility had, and later of trains, which made travel faster and much less expensive.

In the US, artists like Thomas Moran, Thomas Cole, and Albert Bierstadt painted scenes of the sublime: the Rocky Mountains, parts of the Appalachians, storms over the Grand Canyon . . . Places awe-inspiring and terrifying. Anyone who’s been caught in a storm in the mountains, or on the High Plains for that matter, knows that feeling of overwhelming awe at the magnitude and beauty in the danger. The sublime includes an element of danger. A lovely meadow is not sublime. A storm lashing the Eiger with snow and ice is sublime. (Listening to thunder echo off of rain-blackened mountains in the eastern Alps in Austria as you try to become one with the moss on the rocks is another example, especially when rocks clink and clatter down the scree-field on the other side of the narrow little valley that feeds into the larger river around the bend in the mountain slope.)

First came the Romantics, then people suffering from TB. Mystics and people on religious pilgrimage had always gone up into the mountains, but now it became a secular, or even neo-animist pastime. People went to the mountains to go to the mountains, to experience the sublime, to “dry out their lungs,” to go somewhere different. And they complained about the lack of accommodations, so along came lodges and inns, then eventually resorts. And sanitoria, places for people with lung disease to rest and breathe the clean and drier air.

Today we take “going to the mountains” a bit for granted. It used to be a big thing when I was growing up, for people to take long weekends and go to New Mexico. We didn’t go to the desert, unless it was to visit Carlsbad Caverns. We went to Angel Fire, or Santa Fe, or Taos, or Eagle’s Nest, or Red River. Up in the mountains, to ski, hike, fish, or just hang out in lumpy terrain. The mountains had been tamed. Still, if you get caught on a ridge when the afternoon storms billow and begin to mutter . . .

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