Mountains and Memory

The secret Strength of things
Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
Of heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If to the human mind's imaginings
Silence and solitude were vacancy?

--Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mont Blanc"

When we're small, and our eyes first acquire the power to focus on distant vistas, we naturally look up and away, and the first imaginatively stirring thing we see when we do so is the line between earth and sky, between the inhabited or inhabitable world and empty space. Childhood is ringed round with vertical perceptions--trees, rooftops, ridgelines--and those horizons of our childish worlds, engraved first and therefore most deeply on our forming minds, retain a vividness that impressions acquired later in life can never hope of approximating, even remotely. This is the source of the haunted quality of the landscape of one's childhood that Wordsworth made a poetic career of trying to describe. In the presence of those original stimuli, the old synaptic pathways fire again.

But when those synapses do fire, the feeling you get isn't pleasure or delight or joy or elevation or deep calm (or any of the other descriptors that Wordsworth trotted out to try to nail it down). It's familiarity. It's the sense you get of seeing something that's exactly where it's supposed to be, when your glance has fallen on it, expecting to see it, and seeing it when it sees it. I'm not surprised or delighted when I see my right thumbnail or the way I tuck my right foot behind my left heel when I type. And I'm not surprised when I crest the hill on the eastbound 24 freeway as it leaves the Pleasant Hill Road on ramp and approaches the 680 interchange, and the massive two shouldered hump of Mt. Diablo appears. It's beautiful, to be sure--symmetrical, variegated, at once gentle and imposing, a stout grandfather of a mountain: big, but not too big, and with an inviting lap. But above all, Mt. Diablo is just whereit is, and where it's always been, and it looks just as familiar today--even though I've lived away from it for twenty years--as it did when I saw it on my way to work or school or in the background of a million other everyday glimpses through the thousands of days and nights when I lived in its prodigious shadows.

Mountains store memories. Or, better, they silently inspire us to develop memories, and then they wait, patiently, kindly, effortlessly maintaining their momentous outlines, for the moment when our glance falls on them and an ancient impression awakens, as vivid as the moment it was created. As Shelley wrote,

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high;--the power is there
The still and solemn power of many sights,
And many sounds, and much of life and death.

I realize now that the power Shelley's talking about isn't the mountain's power of rock and snow and height and age and mystery--the potential energy that could be, and periodically is, converted to kinetic energy by avalanche and snowmelt, as I've been wrongly telling my students for years. The only important power that Mont Blanc has is the power to create and then access memories. My experience this weekend, repeated now with predictability that has now solidified into scientific law, shows that Mt. Diablo is my Mont Blanc. Still and serene, but as familiar as my own body, it drew my senses from the finite into the infinite, for which I am now, as a professional intellectual (whatever that means) deeply grateful. But I don't greet Mt. Diablo as a Wordsworthian nature worshipper or effusive scenery enthusiast. Mt. Diablo's greatest significance in my life may be that it has so little specific symbolic or biographic meaning. As Edmund Hillary supposedly said of Mt. Everest, it's there. But that's all a mountain has to be. Our minds do the rest.