We see what artists have taught us to see.

 

“During the first seventeen centuries of the Christian era, ‘Mountain Gloom’ so clouded human eyes that never for a moment did poets see mountains in the full radiance to which our eyes have become accustomed. Within a century — indeed, within fifty years — all this was changed. The ‘Mountain Glory’ dawned, then shone full splendor …. What men see in Nature is a result of what they have been taught to see — lessons they have learned in school, doctrines they have heard in church, books they have read.”

Marjorie Hope Nicolson in Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite)

 

Our scholar also quotes a famous art critic regarding poets and writers in antiquity:

“Mountains! I remember none. The Greeks did not seem, as artists, to know that such things were in the world. They carved, or variously represented, men, and horses, and beasts, and birds, and all kinds of living creatures, — yes, even down to the cuttle-fish; and trees, in a sort of way; but not so much as the outline of a mountain.”

John Ruskin (from Modern Painters)

We tend to think our contemporary feelings about the world have been shared by everyone at all times. It is a common myopia. But according to Ms. Nicolson, only in the 18th century — among English poets and painters — did mountains became the spiritual symbols we recognize today. High and chiselled mountains (the Alps for example) began to evoke feelings of awe and reverence. Before that time, monumental peaks were ignored, feared, considered obstacles to travel, their jaggedness reckoned ugly and therefore repugnant. Perceptions have changed. In the 21st Century we enjoy a profusion of images celebrating literally every peak on earth, captured shrouded by immense clouds, punctuated by sun-stars, or saturated with colors intended to provoke trembling delight.

It is worth mentioning Chinese people recognized the aesthetic value of mountains far earlier than Europeans. In fact they invented the landscape genre in the early centuries B.C. They developed a tradition celebrating rugged pinnacles, trees and temples. Chinese poet-sages derived knowledge and inspiration from such scenes early in the first millennium of our era, more than a thousand years before the English writers had their epiphanies.

Below I am sharing an image of the tallest mountain in the lower forty-eight states, Mount Whitney. It is an awesome sight under almost any weather conditions.