Getting Wisdom from Mountains

When I think back to my American history classes in public school, I think that mountains got mentioned mostly as something challenging to be crossed.  First, there was European-Americans' discovery of the Cumberland Gap through the Appalachian Mountains.  Later, there was Lewis and Clark's challenge of getting over the immense Rockies if they were going to reach the Pacific Coast.

Today, when I browse in the works of a number of Chinese writers, I find them mentioning mountains more as a means for growing in wisdom.  True, the contrast might come from a difference in genre (literature contrasted with history).  But maybe there is also a difference between East and West.

Li Po

More than once do mountains raise their head in the poetry of the 8th-century Li Po, a romantic lover of simple life and fellowship.  My favorite is the deceptively simple four-line poem entitled "The Ching-ting Mountain":

"Flocks of birds have flown high and away;

A solitary drift of cloud, too, has gone, wandering on.

And I sit alone with the Ching-ting Peak, towering beyond.

We never grow tired of each other, the mountain and I."

Li Po's saying he sat alone with a mountain made me recall an Oriental painting on a book jacket for an anthology of writers about Nature.  The painting depicted a boy, seated in the branch of a tree, his back to the viewer, looking at a not too distant mountain.  What might I see as I look through that boy's eyes?

Several years back, my wife saw a film in which she got a good look at the great mountains of China, and she was surprised to discover that they do actually rise up, and up, and up -- just the way they do in traditional Chinese paintings.  Until then, she always thought the painters had been exaggerating for artistic effect.

In Chinese landscape paintings, mountains are frequently dominant. The early 20th-century writer Lin Yutang, who emigrated from China to the U.S., made an insightful observation about the smallness of the human figures in contrast to the mountains.  He wrote: "Nature... if it can cure nothing else... can cure man of megalomania... That is why Chinese paintings always paint human figures so small in a landscape."

My wife and I have had the joy of visiting the U.S. national parks that straddle the Rocky Mountains:  Rocky Mt. Natl. Park and Glacier Natl. Park.  When I recall those trips, I remember our driving the winding roads built by venturesome and hard-working laborers, thus allowing tourists today to venture in a way Lewis and Clark never could have.  I remember taking photographs from a number of lookout points.  The sights were beautiful.  However, if I struggle for words to state succinctly my impression of the mountains, almost comically I can come up only with the word "big."   Yet, I would not mind, like Li Po, having a chance to just sit for a while and contemplate a mountain.

~~~

Have your traveled in mountains?  What were your impressions?

(The Li Po poem, trans. by Shigeyoshi Obata, is from The Works of Li Po, by Obata, © 1922.)

(The Lin Yutang quotation is fromThe Importance of Living, by Lin Yutang, © 1937.)

(The drawing of Li Po is in the Public Domain, its copyright having expired.)