Continents and Cobblestones

Eighteen years ago, I walked my dog through the overgrown trails of Frick Park. When I reached a certain ridge, I stopped. My dog did not want to pause, but I saw a vista of blue mountains in the distance. It was a view that needed to stared at.

Those blue hills beyond the Monongahela River definitely have a name, but I still do not know what it is. I did not look it up on purpose. Over the eons, I’m certain these hills have had several names, but for me they have none. I preferred the way they sat as a distant blue wall on the edge of the horizon with the Monongahela meandering gently away from them. A train horn echoed in the distance. I knew that if I wanted to, I could have visited them. But instead I left my blue remembered hills alone. I let them be on the horizon untouched.

As a young writer, I was struck by Wordsworth’s observation in The Tables Turned, “Our meddling intellect mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: We murder to dissect.” So to name those blue remembered hills, or to dissect their geological history would be to lose what I first saw there.

In many cases, I am uncomfortable with things that remain unspoken. As a novelist, my whole goal is to put words to the invisible stories in my head. Yet, as soon as I write a story down, I know that I am losing something. Unwritten stories have infinite possibilities which must be sacrificed when they are written in black and white. So as a sort of an exercise in restraint, I have always remembered my blue hills as nameless.

This exercise doesn’t come easy to me. Before I became a writer, I wanted to be a scientist. Specifically, I wanted to be an astronomer. For me stars were the distant horizon of nature. I wanted to become closer to that awe I experienced in dark, misty fields staring up at infinite skies.

As a high school freshman, I devoured university-level textbooks about astronomy. Yet, the more I learned the less interested I became in astronomy. I slowly realized, that at least for me, the math was papering over the majesty of the reality. Of course, I respect science’s efforts, I stand on its shoulders and have seen far. But most of me did not want to dissect the stars, I wanted to experience them whole, and I hoped memorizing some more math might do that.

It doesn’t work that way.

As I sat staring out at my blue hills, my dog finally settled down with a big sigh and stared at the bugs crawling up and down an overgrown tuft of grass. For that brief moment those distant hills pulled me toward them with intense gravity.

But this time, I didn’t want to dissect the experience too much. (Ironically, right then I had no idea then I’d write an essay all about it!)

It’s the same constant dilemma I feel as a parent with a phone in my pocket. Do I document what my kids are doing to savor it later? Or do I stay in the moment, and live it first, and see if the memory sticks on its own?

C.S. Lewis called these transcendental experiences joy in his memoir Surprised by Joy (also cribbing from a poem of Wordsworth). He called joy “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. … anyone who has experienced it will want it again.”

Yes, that’s exactly what I’d hoped to find in the stars. Joy.

The details matter, even though they individually mean nothing, the simple act of noticing and noting them is important. Wordsworth was only half right; sometimes writers must dissect. That’s why, so many years later, I composed this essay about my blue remembered hills, while still granting them the respect of remaining nameless.

G.K. Chesterton wrote:

The initial awe of nature lies in the big things, like my vast blue remembered hills. But oftentimes these big things are just too big. Even to attempt to conquer them in words is to risk losing them. Occasionally, it is among the details of everyday that I brush past the invisible again. There’s the same longing, the same thrill the same pain as I felt with my blue remembered hills. I wonder if my dog also saw something in the tufts of grass by his nose? Or perhaps he was just resigned to his author-owner’s penchant for random stops in his daily walk. But I digress…

G.K. Chesterton continues:

“The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it. Moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round… [But] it is just as easy to think in continents as to think in cobblestones. The difficulty comes in when we seek to know the substance of either of them.”

I am now resigned to the fact that the great forests of the unspoken are far too vast to ever be described. Those who attempt it are often guilty of the worst kinds of cliché (myself included). This is not a new problem. In A Brief History of Infinity Paolo Zellini notes that ancient descriptions of the inexpressible infinite usually described what it was not. They all started with a- the Greek prefix meaning NOT. “Ageneton, anolethron, ateleston, aperion, aphtharton: ‘uncreated, indestructible, endless, infinite, undecaying’. Such words insistently point to an ineffable reality which we can only try to verbalize.” But rather than a negation, I prefer Lewis’ term: Joy.

Joy is something too big to be described. It can only be glimpsed quickly in various normal things. Something like blue remembered hills. For Lewis it was moss in a cookie tin that awakened a brief, if sickeningly intense, transcendental hunger for something nameless.

Of course, as Christians, we know that that nameless does have a name. But I wonder sometimes if we lose respect for that immensity of God because we do have his name. I think that’s why the Bible insists that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fear in the Hebrew and the Greek does mean literal fear, but that fear is meant to be also a kind of fear that you have for something you not only don’t understand but can’t understand.

God wants a relationship with us, so he’s given us a name, because he knows we need that. But never forget that just because we have God’s name, we do not understand him, any more than we can actually count to infinity.

The proper response to God is awe. Awe at something bigger than the universe, someone older than infinity. Awe is the starting point.

And as a writer, my whole goal is to trigger awe in you.

It’s not something I can ever succeed at 100% of the time.

After all, I am unable to control my own experiences of awe much less yours. However, I can slowly hone my craft to try to attempt to express, as nearly as possible, the joy caused by catching a glimpse of the nameless in a wall of distant blue hills beyond the Monongahela.

And I wonder, can you remember something that triggered that awe in you? When were you last surprised by joy?

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Speaking of Wordsworth and his connections to C.S. Lewis’ Surprised By Joy don’t miss Rachel Donahue’s profound and funny conversation with Carolyn Weber (Surprised by Oxford).

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“Joy was not a deception.
Its visitations were rather the moment of clearest consciousness we had.”
-C.S. Lewis, in Surprised By Joy