The Art of Hiking

Don't miss the meaning of the world.

Nov 01, 2024

Nathan Beacom is a writer and philosopher who works for the Lyceum Movement, an organization devoted to “social, festive events that explore the big ideas of art, philosophy, history and more.” Among these events is the yearly Tallgrass Ideas Festival in Des Moines, Iowa, where

Samuel Kimbriel

recorded an episode of the WoC podcast last summer. Today, he continues our ongoing conversation about meaning, nature, and the cosmos.

— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor

As I was climbing over the Alps this summer, taking in the sublimity of its cobalt peaks, the simple beauty of the sweet little succulent flowers, and the green fabric of the valleys below, I did not ask myself any metaphysical questions, thank God. In fact, I take it as an important part of the experience of beauty that we simply bask in it, soak and drink it in, without too much in the way of analysis and calculation. This can give rise to big questions about existence, to be sure, but prior to any of that is a movement of the heart, one which may be inexpressible in words. It is that movement, that experience, which is more important even than the questions. In fact, questions asked too soon can interrupt the experience and movement of the heart.

In a recent episode of the podcast, philosopher Charles Taylor’s idea of making “cosmic connections” was contrasted with

Damir Marusic

’s protestations that, as an atheist, he feels no need to make any metaphysical inquiries when he is moved by the beauty of, say, the Alps. When Taylor talks about cosmic connections, or when the poets write about them, they are talking about how we see beautiful things as somehow overflowing, as being “more” than they are. That’s why poets see in a mountain universal, spiritual ideas, like nobility, majesty, freedom, or even heartbreak. Damir’s experience in the mountains was presented as evidence that not all people make these cosmic connections. But I don’t think the fact that he doesn’t always start doing philosophy while he’s hiking means that Damir, or anyone, fails to make these connections. I just think it means he isn’t annoying.

But why does this matter? It matters because this kind of experience of cosmic connection is fundamental to human nature, and to deny it is to deny one of the most important parts of ourselves. Some will follow these threads of connection until they lead up to God, others will choose not to pursue the road, but that choice doesn't indicate that the connections aren't there. I think it would be helpful, in this context, to add some more color to what a “cosmic connection” is, because, as I’ve said, I think we all make them, and I think they’re one of the most important things we do. To look at the world in this cosmic way, though, is a choice, and to the extent we nourish it, we become more human, and to the extent we deny it, our experience of the world becomes flat and stale.

Pardon in Brittany (1896), Gaston La Touche.

Earlier this year, I was on a walk through Chicago Art Institute, when I stopped at a painting I’d never noticed before, by a painter I’d never heard of, Gaston La Touche. I stopped immediately. The scene depicts a crowd of French women in the morning twilight, their quiet dark dresses studded with little warm globes of candlelight, and crowned by white headdresses that look like a fluttering flock of pelicans. In their midst, a priest carries a long lit taper. Emerging from this expectant, hushed procession, rides a woman with a young child on her lap, in dark clothes on a white horse, against the purple of the pre-dawn.

There was no description. I didn’t know what it was really about. A funeral? A baptism? All I knew was that I felt it in my chest the way you feel a firework that’s gone off too close. Suddenly I seemed shrouded in the quiet of the world before sunrise, that I was in the presence of something noble, sacred, human. A swirl of inarticulate movements welled up inside me. I was sad, I was comforted, I was a bit nervous at being so moved. Somehow I felt a deep nostalgia for who knows what; I sensed the high nobility of countless unknown caring mothers down the ages, was moved by some intuition of true charity in the hearts of ordinary, unremembered people. And all of this was at once, and none of it clear or articulate. In my heart were resonances of loss, forgiveness, and peace in pain.

What was going on? Not analysis, not dumb pleasure either. It was a kind of emotion, yes, but also a kind of knowledge, not a mere feeling. Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher, had a way of explaining this kind of experience, which he called “poetic intuition.” It is not a knowledge arrived at through conceptual reasoning, but by way of a resonance between something seen and ourselves.

Now look at the metaphor. When a string on a guitar is plucked near another string tuned to the same pitch, both ring. They ring because they share the same nature — they are the same material, stretched to the same tautness, and vibrating at the same frequency. So it is that beautiful things resonate with us, we are, so to speak, tuned to receive them. When I looked at those women in quiet procession, I saw realities that resonated with things inside of me. My own affective knowledge of calm, forgiveness, love, and so on, were contained right there in that painting, and I knew it immediately, without inquiring about it, without giving it words, without any kind of analysis. I can make this experience explicit through reflection, but its reality was there all along.

This is what poetry is. A poet looks at reality, resonates with it, and is capable of putting that resonance into language, to pluck our own heartstrings with the same note. A poet and I might look at the same scene, but she will have been attentive to that resonance and will have been able to put it into words. When we read what she says, we might say, “Ah! That’s what I felt, but didn’t know how to describe!” or, “Now I see something new in the scene which I did not see before!” Analogy and metaphor are simply devices of resonance, whereby we see this thing connected with that by threads of commonality we had not heretofore imagined. “The fog comes on little cat’s feet,” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul” — these are cosmic connections.

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning described this in her long poem, “Aurora Leigh.” In one passage, she describes the unique power of human nature to look, not just at, but, if you will, into nature, and find the cosmic connections there:

TRUTH, so far, in my book;—the truth which draws
Through all things upwards,—that a twofold world
Must go to a perfect cosmos. …
Who paints a tree, a leaf, a common stone
With just his hand, and finds it suddenly
A-piece with and conterminous to his soul?
Why else do these things move him, leaf, or stone?
The bird’s not moved, that pecks at a spring-shoot;
Nor yet the horse, before a quarry, a-graze:
But man, the twofold creature, apprehends
The twofold manner, in and outwardly,
And nothing in the world comes single to him,
A mere itself,—cup, column, or candlestick…
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
… Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more from the first similitude.

Nothing in the world comes by itself to us. Nothing comes disconnected from the whole. Everything we see potentially resonates with something else. So in a little bee we might discern the spinning star, or the universe in a grain of sand. That’s poetic intuition. We see everything in a twofold manner: conceptually, as it presents itself to us, but also intuitively, as it resonates with a hundred other themes of our heart or of our experience. That is why things move us, why art and nature can be “coterminous” with our own soul.

For Browning, this could indeed lead one to think of God. If God was the creator of all, then everything in creation must bear some likeness to the one from which it came. Everything, then, resonates with that primeval being and goodness that is God. If this is so, then the whole world, she writes, is crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. And this is why, even though we ask and investigate no metaphysical question, we may indeed feel a kind of reverence, a sacredness, a desire to take off our sandals, though we know not exactly why.

For Browning, though, there is a risk that we will look at the world in another way, merely through the eyes of use and consumption. This really does kill the poetic vision. If in a berry bush I can only see opportunities for money making or material pleasure, if I cannot step back and see its beauty in its own right, then I can never really see its significance. It remains to me a flat object, only conceivable in terms of my own use. Then I sit, and pluck, and dab my face, and miss the meaning.

Some years ago, in the Rocky Mountains, I had an experience like the one in front of the painting. On a snowy ledge, in the sight of nothing human, it was utterly quiet save for the whooshing pine over my shoulder. Something stirred in me. I caught a hint of something unknown, higher, and felt as though I was not alone. There was some sense of personality to the scene before me. It was not a cold, flat, meaningless lump of atoms; it was inhabited somehow. As the philosopher Roger Scruton would say, nature had a face, it addressed me not as an it, but as a You.

We all have had little moments of beauty like this, and I think they might be some of the most important in our lives. They are so important because they speak to the most important, meaning-giving intuitions of hearts: to love, to hope, to forgiveness, to the idea of home. If we ignore them, if we avoid them, or if we get so caught up in ourselves and our own squalid aims, we miss the meaning of things. We may indeed miss the meaning of life. Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it better than I could:

Natural things
And spiritual, — who separates those two
In art, in morals, or the social drift
Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,
Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,
Is wrong, in short, at all points.

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