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I love the mountains. I also like the fir forests below, and the transition zone, with flowers and dwarf pines, the arid and rocky slopes (or “mineral,” as described in books). And the lakes, and especially the streams and waterfalls. But most of all, I love reaching the top of a mountain.
Climbing to the summit of a mountain is an incomparable experience to any other journey. From up there, everything seems closer: both the sky and everything around – the valley you climbed from, the path you took to get there. You can discern other peaks you know or are now discovering. You see distant places almost up close, you see them inverted: you're as if stuck with your feet to the celestial vault and you look down from there. But be careful, if you take the exercise too seriously, you might get dizzy! The rarefied air gives a euphoric effect – could that be the only cause?
The other day I remembered Petrarch's letter, The Ascent of Mont Ventoux, and I re-read it. Petrarch reads from Saint Augustine at the top of the mountain – this after he had already reflected on the similarity between spiritual ascent and climbing a mountain – and he comes across the following phrase: “And men go forth to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad currents of rivers, the boundless ocean, and the movements of the stars, but they neglect themselves.”He humbly returns down. Could this be why what you feel at the top of a mountain is so uplifting, because it is an imagination of what we should always be doing in our hearts?
For many years in a row, in the same Alpine valley, I would meet groups of traditionalist Jews who weren't very well-equipped for the mountains, but climbed however they could, often by cable car. I found out – I don't know if this is also the reason they met there, but it's possible – that for them, climbing a mountain means drawing closer to God. Stated thus, it seems naive, yet I believe it is true in a mysterious-symbolic way. A mountain represents an axis between heaven and earth. Symbols are (or should be) alive for the faithful, not just a cultural convention. We don't climb mountains to be physically closer to God, but to find oneself like that, clinging to the sky, gazing at the four cardinal points, touches something of the perspective of one who sees things from “above” in Petrarch's sense: perhaps one begins to see them in one's heart.
Of course, it only begins. As for me, I felt more of a joy and an uplifting of the heart; I didn't think then, like Petrarch, of the journey towards the place of the heart, but it is a beginning.
I also noticed that photos taken there cannot convey what the eye and mind see as well as photos taken from below. I wondered why. Perhaps because they cannot capture that euphoria of being there, high up, clinging to the sky, and what appears close to the eye seems distant and blurred in the picture. Perhaps a 360-degree perspective is needed to render the quality of the view. Impossible to capture in a photograph.
It's no coincidence that the Transfiguration occurred on a mountain, close to Heaven. And, like John, Peter, and James, you would want to fix that moment – through photos, today – but you cannot. Photographs do not capture the intoxication of height and the inverted perspective. You cannot catch God by the leg. God is not “a tame lion,” as C.S. Lewis said in “Narnia.” The Taboric light is not recorded on film, nor in pixels; in photos, not even the landscape seems so grand anymore.
Of course, the most important journey is the one a person makes in their heart, towards God. But climbing a mountain can give us a vague idea of the beginning of this journey.
Alexandra de Moffarts
Photos by Alexandra de Moffarts