Climb every mountain

"Was Mooney drunk when he wrote this?"

The answer is no. I had altitude sickness, aka acute mountain sickness (AMS). Are you reading this as an email? Don’t. Read it online or use the Substack app. Are you a subscriber? Excellent. Anything else? No. Did I ask if you were a subscriber? Yes. I did? Yes. Sorry, it’s just that I get nervous around the end of the month. And then there’s the AMS. So. Should we start? Yes.

Petrarch, artist unknown, 17th century

But what if the beginning be dreadful?
The first steps, not like climbing a mountain,
but going through fire?
What if the whole system must undergo a change,
violent as that which we conceive
of the mutation of form in some insects?
What if a process comparable
to flaying alive have to be endured?

— Charles Lamb’s “Confessions of a Drunkard,” 1812

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If you’re alive, male, middle-aged, aching, wheezing, covered tits to toes in lycra and in the south of France — specifically, in the Vaucluse, just outside either the pretty village of Malaucène or the slightly more shabby chic Bédouin, both of which are at the foot of the highest mountain in the region (Mont Ventoux, 1,912 m / 6,270 ft), chances are that the thing between your legs is a bicycle, and right about now you’d probably give your left nut to Lance Armstrong for some performance-enhancing drugs.

If, on the other hand, you’re dead, and have been since the 18th or 19th of July in 1374, and, 38 years earlier, on the 26th April of 1336, when you were 32 years old — so not quite middle-aged as defined in Psalm 90:10 (“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away”) and the first line of The Divine Comedy (“Midway through this life’s journey”), which was completed by your father’s good friend Dante Alighieri in 1321, when you were just 17, and which, when you read it in Bologna at 22, set you on the lifelong path of penning love poems to a lady named Laura in vernacular Italian, 366 in all and most of them sonnets of fourteen hendecasyllabic lines with the rhyme scheme ABBAABBA CDCDCD or ABBAABBA CDECDE (sonnet structures that later will bear your name even though you borrowed them from earlier Italian poets, especially Giacomo da Lentini, who wrote sonnets with these structures in the Sicilian dialect in the thirteenth century) — and you’re in this self-same village of Malaucène, “driven there only by the desire to visit a place renowned for its altitude,” and find yourself with your younger brother walking uphill “not without great difficulty, because this mountain is a mass of rocky earth cut steeply and almost inaccessible”, then chances are you’re the poet Francesco Petrarca, the father of humanism, the intellectual bridge between the medieval and the modern, the first to travel purely for pleasure, the first to criticize couch potatoes — the coldly incurious frigida incuriositas — and the first to because-it-is-there a mountain, whose name English speakers for some reason mononymise and anglicise into “Petrarch” and French speakers mononymisent and gallicisent into “Pétrarque”.

Sorry. That was a bit windy. Take a breath, Francesco. We have a long climb ahead. And the mistral is blowing.

Happy the man who is skilled to understand
Nature’s hid causes; who beneath his feet
All terrors casts, and death’s relentless doom,
And the loud roar of greedy Acheron.
How earnestly should we strive, not to stand on mountain-tops, 
but to trample beneath us those appetites 
which spring from earthly impulses.

—Virgil, The Georgics, 29 B.C.E

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Wrote Augustine, Petrarch’s other main mentor, at the start of Confessions: “When I was young, I burned to get my fill of hellish things.” Evidently, the mamils¹ of Mont Ventoux still like to feel that burn. For few earthly things are more hellish than cycling two kilometres up a mountain. In the hot sun. In lycra. In the company of swarms of like-minded and like-kitted gits. Strength in numbers, I suppose, but still, hellish is hellish is hellishly hellish, no matter how many others are along for the ride. Which I guess explains why we saw so many pulling their hideously expensive bikes out of minivans parked near the top, pedalling the rest of the way up, getting their picture taken under the “Mont Ventoux summit” sign—

Cyclistes au sommet du Ventoux © Radio France - Philippe Paupert

—and then coasting back down to Bédoin.

Cheating, but sensible. And the ride down did indeed look like it would be fun — if there weren’t so many cars and minivans in the way snailing the pace, stopping riders from hitting speeds anywhere near those of Tour de France cyclists. The record is 131.8km/h. We were going about 50 in our rental Yaris. Still, 50 on a bike. Holy shit that’s fast.

And then there are the sheep.

Anyway, enough of all that. Don’t get me wrong. I understand what makes a person want to ride a bike up a mountain. Or, like Petrarch, walk up it. I run. For fun. Which, in the eyes of many, including most of my friends and both of my wife’s, is folly incarnate.

Back to Saint Augustine, who writes of his wish to bring back to mind his “past foulness and the carnal corruptions” of his soul.

“Silvescere ausus sum variis et umbrosis amoribus.” I ventured to go wild with various and shady loves… I dared to run wild in different ways of love… I fearlessly foisoned into outspreading umbrageous loves…

The Latin word silvescere — to “run wild” — literally means to “become forest” or “forest out” or “run to wood”, to be transformed into a vegetal lushness, to be sick of this barren copse and long for the virgin forests of youth, and a pouring out, and a plentitude.

Augustine: “At the time of my young manhood, I burned to be engorged with vileness.” Who didn’t?

Philippe de Chamaigne, Saint Augustin, 1645-1650

“He who can say how he burns with love, has little fire,” said Petrarch. On his Mont Ventoux climb, his two servants presumably carried things to drink and eat. Petrarch carried what was dearest to him — Augustine — in a very small edition, a gift from his father, the human father of the father of humanism.

And off they went, up into the dark forest, for the straight path was lost.

We found in the mountain gorges an elderly shepherd who tried with many words to dissuade us from this ascent. He told us that fifty years previously, animated by the same youthful ardor, he had climbed to the summit, but that he had only brought back repentance and fatigue, having had his body and clothes torn by the stones and brambles. He added that never, before or since, had anyone heard that anyone had dared to do the same. While he uttered these words in a loud voice, as young people are deaf to the advice given to them, his defense redoubled our envy. Seeing then that his efforts were in vain, the old man took a few steps and pointed out to us an arduous path through the rocks, making us a thousand recommendations which he repeated again behind us when we moved away.

We used Google Maps. And, as mentioned above, while we went on some marvellous hikes in the area, for Mont Ventoux, we took the car.

Malaucène, 23 September 2023 at 14:59:47

I am like an atom
A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity
I wish & feel & weep & groan
Ah terrible terrible

—William Blake, “Night the First”, Zala, or The Four Zoas, 1797.

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Psalms 90:10, I have questions: “…for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” What is “it”, who is “we” and why does “we” fly? Yesterday, a bescarved woman sitting on the curb with a beswaddled child on her lap asked me for change. For change! I winked and laughed and walked away. How many times have I got this wrong? How many times have I entered a space and traversed it without seeing it, without touching it, without descending into it? Streets, faces, forests, names. It is all about descending. When you read of some bright man's doubts and fears, his feelings of inadequacy and confusion, his fall from grace, his sordidness, it solaces at first — thank God you think, others thinking and acting like me, the same crushing weakness, the same inability to track present failings and promises. Or worse!

Augustine: “We can see from this that the soul is weak and helpless unless it clings to the firm rock of truth. Men give voice to their opinions, but they are only opinions, like so many puffs of wind that waft the soul hither and tither and make it veer and turn.”

Opinions. Who cares? No one cares! The incapacity to master the pull and surge of the earth, to think and act through the mutating thoughts and acts of thinking and doing, that is what this is about, that is what we must overcome. Tears, tears, tears, cry the poets, from the young Petrarch on. A not uncommon experience. No reason for such a flap. No one cares! How many bedside tables in how many hotels, slide open the drawer, flip the damned disputed thing open, drop a finger on a page: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying.” So, too, thus, did our poet, notoriously, under the heaven-touching canopies of pine and oak, cedar, beech, mountain fir and larch, amid the rich perfumes of rosemary and thyme, the loamy earth and hot molasse fragrant under the sweetly hot sun and the unaccustomed quality of the clean, thin, fresh mountain air, the great sweep of view spread out in front of him, behind him, surrounding him.

My brother, by a shorter route, tended towards the top of the mountain; I, weaker, headed downwards, and as he reminded me and pointed out a more direct route, I told him that I hoped to find another side an easier passage, and that I did not fear a longer, but more convenient, path. I covered my weakness with this excuse, and while the others were already occupying the heights, I wandered in the valley without discovering a gentler access, but having lengthened my route and needlessly doubled my trouble. Already overwhelmed with weariness, I regretted having taken the wrong route, and I resolved to reach the summit. When, full of fatigue and anxiety, I had joined my brother, who was waiting for me and had rested by sitting for a long time, we walked for some time at an even pace. We had barely left this hill when, forgetting my first detour, I plunged once again towards the bottom of the mountain; I travel the valley a second time, and, while looking for a long and easy route, I fall into a long difficulty. I postponed the trouble of going up; but the genius of man does not suppress the nature of things, and it is impossible for a body to reach upwards by descending. In short, this happened to me three or four times in a few hours to my great annoyance, and not without making my brother laugh. After being disappointed so often, I sat down at the bottom of a valley, with tears in my eyes.

You see where this is going? Tears are falling, but they are not a failing, they are a sign that you are still alive, that you can still be touched. Feelings are produced by emotions. They are bodily processes, a set of chemical and neural responses. Whitman, the old sick coot:

Tears! Tears! Tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears;
On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck’d in by the sand;
Tears -- not a star shining -- all dark and desolate;
Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head:
-- O who is that ghost? -- that form in the dark, with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch’d there on the sand?
Streaming tears -- sobbing tears -- throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering, with swift steps along the beach; 
O wild and dismal night storm, with wind! O belching and desperate!
O shade, so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated pace;
But away, at night, as you fly, none looking -- O then the unloosen’d ocean,
Of tears! tears! tears! 

—Walt Whitman, “Salut au Monde,” Leaves of Grass, 1900.

I spoke of tears in these pages before.

At the top is the end of everything and the end of the road which is the goal of our journey. We all want to achieve this; but, as Ovid says: It is little to want; to possess something, one must desire it strongly.

OK, cut to the summit. Petrarch, like us, was blown away by the view.

First struck by the unusual breath of the air and the vast expanse of the spectacle, I remained motionless in amazement… We cannot see from there the summit of the Pyrenees, these limits of France and Spain, not because there is any obstacle that I know of, but only because of the weakness of human sight. We could clearly see the mountains of the Lyon province on the right, and on the left the sea of Marseille and that which bathes Aigues-Mortes, a few days' walk away. The Rhône was before our eyes.

And then, he opens his Augustine —

—with the intention of reading whatever came to hand, for I could happen upon nothing that would be otherwise than edifying and devout. Now it chanced that the tenth book presented itself… and where I first fixed my eyes it was written:

“And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.”

I was abashed, and, asking my brother (who was anxious to hear more), not to annoy me, I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things… Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself.

The poet, the exertion from the climb aching in his calves, his lungs and heart and brain and soul on fire, races down the mountain, trampling earthly appetites left and right, inward eye turned outward, feet slipping and sliding on the shale, hendecasyllables dangling hither thither between his legs. We should do likewise. Why climb mountains? Forget about bicycles. Get out of the woods. Take off the lycra. Return to the valley of the soul.

It is alleged that eighteen hours after starting his climb, Petrarch found himself back in his room in Malaucène, where, before dinner, he knocked out l'Ascesa al Monte Ventoso in one fell swoop, all 6,000 words of it, in perfect Latin with correct citations from the works of his mentors and all his fave poets. And a couple of Laura sonnets besides.

Ha.

It’s fiction. Written almost two decades later. So? Did he even climb Mont Ventoux? Most modern scholars doubt it. Who cares? It’s an amazing piece of writing. Written by just another git pulling his bike out of the minivan. A passenger. A tourist. A Renaissance man. And a modern, as this passage from his Mont Ventoux demonstrates: “What I used to love, I no longer love. I lie. I like it, but moderately. I'm lying again… There, I’ve finally told the truth. Yes, I love, but what I would like not to love, what I would like to hate. However, I love, but in spite of myself, but by force, but with sadness and with tears, and I verify in myself the meaning of this famous verse: I will hate if I can; otherwise, I would love in spite of myself.”

BTW, I wrote this in one fell swoop. Could you tell?

Thanks for reading. Thanks for subscribing. Are you a subscriber? What? I asked already?

Jeesh.

Sorry. It’s just —

1. “Middle-aged men in lycra” — but you knew this already. I just learned it. Thank you, Beth. And thank you — and Jake — for three glorious days in Bédoin.