God is said to have spent much time in the Sinai, most notably two years in the central region, looking after a group of irascible Israelites who complained about the lack of food and had a weakness for foreign gods. ‘The Lord came from Sinai,' said Moses shortly before his death (Deuteronomy 33:2). ‘And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly,' we are told by Exodus (19:18). ‘And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed and stood afar off. And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you…' (Exodus 20:18-19).
But biblical history serves only to reinforce an impression that would have occurred anyway to a traveller encamped in the Sinai: an impression that some intentional being must have had a hand in this, something greater than man and with an intelligence that mere ‘nature' does not possess—a ‘something' for which the word God still seems, even to the secular mind, a far from unlikely appellation. The knowledge that natural rather than supernatural forces can also create beauty and an impression of power seems peculiarly ineffective when one stands before a sandstone valley rising towards what appears to be a giant altar, above which hangs a slender crescent moon.
Early writers on the sublime repeatedly connected sublime landscapes with religion:
Joseph Addison, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination' (1712): A vast space naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being.'
Thomas Gray, Letters (1739): ‘There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument'
Thomas Cole, ‘Essay on American Scenery' (1835): Amid those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, the associations are of God the creator—they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature' (1836): ‘The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.'
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside. The landscapes offered them an emotional connection to a greater power, even as they freed them of the need to subscribe to the more specific and now less plausible claims of biblical texts and organised religions.
7.
The link between God and sublime landscapes is made most explicit in one book of the Bible. The circumstances are peculiar: God is asked by a righteous but desperate man to explain why his life has become full of suffering. And God answers him by bidding him to contemplate the deserts and the mountains, rivers and ice caps, oceans and skies. Seldom have sublime places been asked to bear the burden of such a weighty, urgent question.
At the beginning of the Book of Job, described by Edmund Burke as the most sublime book of the Old Testament, we learn that Job was a wealthy, devout man from the land of Uz. He had seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys. His wishes were obeyed, and his virtue was rewarded. Then one day disaster struck. The Sabaeans stole Job's oxen and asses, lightning killed his sheep and the Chaldeans raided his camels. A hurricane blew in from the desert and wrecked the house of his eldest son, killing him and his siblings. Painful sores developed from the soles of Job's feet to the top of his head, and, as he sat in the ashes of his house, he scratched them with a piece of broken pottery and wept.
Why had Job been so afflicted? His friends had the answer: he had sinned. Bildad the Shuhite told Job that his children could not have been killed by God unless they and Job himself had done wrong. ‘God will not reject a righteous man,' said Bildad. Zophar the Naamathite ventured that God must have been generous in his treatment of Job: ‘Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.'
But Job could not accept these words. He called them ‘proverbs of ashes' and ‘defences of clay'. He had not been a bad man—so why had bad things happened to him?
It is one of the most acute questions asked of God in all the books of the Old Testament. And from a whirlwind in the desert, a furious God answers Job as follows:
Who is this that darhneth counsel by words without knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man; for! will demand of thee, and answer thou me.
Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou has understanding
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?…
By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?
Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder?…
Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?…
Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?
Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee?…
Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?
Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings towards the south?
Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?
Asked to explain why Job has been made to suffer even though he has been good, God draws Job's attention to the mighty phenomena of nature. Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way he declares: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe. See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our lives are not the measure of all things: consider sublime places for a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.
There is a strictly religious message here. God assures Job that he has a place in his heart, even if all events do not centre around him and may at times appear to run contrary to his interest. When divine wisdom eludes human understanding, the righteous, made aware of their limitations by the spectacle of sublime nature, must continue to trust in God's plans for the universe.
8.
But the religious answer to Job's question does not invalidate the story for secular spirits. Sublime landscapes, through their grandeur and power, retain a symbolic role in bringing us to accept without bitterness or lamentation the obstacles that we cannot overcome and the events that we cannot make sense of. As the Old Testament God
knew, it can be helpful to back up deflationary points about mankind with reference to the very elements in nature which physically surpass it—the mountains, the girdle of the earth, the deserts.
If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
ART
VII
On Eye-Opening Art
1.
One summer I was invited to spend a few days with friends in a farmhouse in Provence. I knew that the word Provence was for many people rich in associations, though it meant little to me. I tended to switch off at its mention, out of a sense, founded on l
ittle, that the place would not be congenial to me. What I did know was that Provence was generally held by sensible people to be very beautiful—'Ah, Provence!' they would sigh, with a reverence otherwise reserved for opera or Delft porcelain.
I flew to Marseilles and, after renting a small Renault at the airport, headed for the home of my hosts, which lay at the foot of the Alpilles hills, between the towns of Aries and Saint-Rémy At the exit out of Marseilles, I grew confused and ended up at the giant oil refinery at Fos-sur-Mer, whose tangle of pipes and cooling towers spoke of the complexity involved in the manufacture of a liquid that I was used to putting into my car with scant thought for its origins.
I found my way back to the N568, which led me inland across the wheat-growing plain of La Crau. Outside the village of Saint-Martin-de-Crau, a few miles from my destination, being too early, I pulled off the road and turned off the engine. I had come to a stop on the edge of an olive grove. It was quiet save for the sounds made by cicadas hidden in the trees. Behind the grove were wheat fields bordered by a row of cypresses, over whose tops rose the irregular ridge of the Alpilles hills. The sky was a cloudless blue.
I scanned the view. I was not looking for anything in particular—not for predators, holiday homes or memories. My motive was simple and hedonistic: I was looking for beauty. ‘Delight and enliven me' was my implicit challenge to the olive trees, cypresses and skies of Provence. It was a vast, loose agenda, and my eyes were bewildered at their freedom. Without the motives that had marked the rest of the day—to seek out the airport, the exit out of Marseilles and so on—they careered from object to object, so that if their path had been traced by the mark of a giant pencil, the sky would soon have been darkened by random and impatient patterns.
Although the landscape was not ugly, I could not—after a few moments of scrutiny—detect the charm so often ascribed to it. The olive trees looked stunted, more like bushes than like trees, and the wheat fields evoked the flat, dull expanses of southeastern England, where I had attended a school and been unhappy. I lacked the energy to register the barns, the limestone of the hills or the poppies growing at the feet of a group of cypresses.
Bored and uncomfortable in the Renault's increasingly hot plastic interior, I set off for my destination and greeted my hosts with the remark that this was simply paradise.
Because we find places to be beautiful as immediately and as apparently spontaneously as we find snow to be cold or sugar sweet, it is hard to imagine that there is anything we might do to alter or expand our attractions. It seems that matters have been decided for us by qualities inherent in the places themselves or by hardwiring in our psyches, and that we would therefore be as helpless to modify our sense of the places we find beautiful as we would our preference for the ice creams we find appetising.
Yet aesthetic tastes may be less rigid than this analogy suggests. We overlook certain places because nothing has ever prompted us to conceive of them as being worthy of appreciation, or because some unfortunate but random association has turned us against them. Thus our relationship to olive trees might be improved if we directed our attention towards the silver in their leaves or the structure of their branches; new associations might be created around wheat once we are directed to the pathos of this fragile and yet essential crop as its stalks bend their grain-filled heads in the wind. We might find something to appreciate in the skies of Provence once we are told, even if only in the crudest way that it is the shade of blue that counts.
And perhaps the most effective means of enriching our sense of what to look for in a scene is by studying visual art. We could conceive of many works of art as being immensely subtle instruments for telling us what amounts in effect to ‘Look at the sky of Provence, redraw your notion of wheat, do justice to olive trees.' From amidst the million things in, for example, a wheat field, a successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator. It will foreground elements ordinarily lost in the mass of data, stabilise them and, once we are acquainted with them, prompt us imperceptibly to find them in the world about us—or, if we have already found them, lend us the confidence to give them weight in our lives. We will be like a person around whom a word has been mentioned on many occasions, but who only begins to hear it once he or she has learnt its meaning.
And insofar as we travel in search of beauty, works of art may in small ways start to influence where we would like to travel to.
2.
Vincent van Gogh arrived in Provence at the end of February 1888. He was thirty-four years old and had dedicated himself to painting only eight years before, after failing in attempts to become first a teacher and then a priest. For the previous two years he had been living in Paris with his brother Theo, an art dealer, who supported him financially. He had had little artistic training but had befriended Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and exhibited his work alongside theirs at the Café du Tambourin on the Boulevard de Clichy.
‘I can still remember vividly how excited I became that winter when travelling from Paris to Aries,' van Gogh would recall of his sixteen-hour train journey to Provence. On his arrival in what was then the most prosperous town in the region and a centre for the olive trade and railway engineering, van Gogh carried his bags in the snow (an exceptional ten inches had fallen that day) to the small Hotel Carrel, not far from Aries's northern ramparts. Despite the weather and the small size of his room, he was enthusiastic about his southerly move. As he told his sister, ‘I believe that life here is just a little more satisfying than in many other spots.'
Van Gogh was to remain in Aries until May 1889, fifteen months during which he produced approximately two hundred paintings, a hundred drawings and two hundred letters—a period generally agreed to have been his greatest. The earliest works show Aries lying under snow, the sky a limpid blue, the earth a frozen pink. Five weeks after van Gogh arrived, spring came, and he painted fourteen canvases of trees in bloom in the fields outside the town. At the beginning of May he painted the Langlois drawbridge over the Arles-Bouc Canal, on the south side of Aries, and at the end of the month he produced a number of views from the plain of La Crau, looking towards the Alpilles hills and the ruined abbey of Montmajour. He also painted the reverse scene, climbing the rocky slopes of the abbey for a view of Aries. By the middle of June his attention had shifted to a new subject: the harvest, of which he completed ten paintings in only two weeks. He worked with extraordinary speed, or as he put it, ‘quickly quickly, quickly and in a hurry, like a harvester who is silent under the blazing sun, intent only on his reaping'. He noted, ‘I work even in the middle of the day in the full sunshine, and I enjoy it like a cicada. My God, if I had only known this part of the country at the age of twenty-five, instead of coming here when I was thirty-five years old!'
Later, explaining to his brother why he had moved from Paris to Aries, van Gogh offered two reasons: because he wanted to ‘paint the South' and because he wanted, through his work, to help other people to ‘see' it. However unsure he might be of his own powers to achieve that, he never wavered in his faith that the project was theoretically possible—that is, that artists could paint a portion of the world and in consequence open the eyes of others to it.
If he had such faith in the eye-opening power of art, it was because he had often experienced it himself, as a spectator. Since moving to France from his native Holland, he had felt it most particularly in relation to literature. He had read the works of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Maupassant and been grateful to those writers for opening his eyes to the dynamics of French society and psychology. Madame Bovary had taught him about provincial middle-class life, and Pere Goriot about penniless but ambitious students in Paris; he now recognised the characters from these novels in society at large.
Paintings had similarly opened his eyes. Van Gogh frequently paid tribute to painters who had allowed him to see certain colours and atmospheres. Velazquez, for example, had given him a map that allowed him to se
e grey. Several of Velazquez's canvases depicted humble Iberian interiors with walls of brick or a sombre plaster, where, even in the middle of the day when the shutters were closed to protect the house from the heat, the dominant colour was a sepulchral grey, occasionally pierced, where the shutters were not quite closed or where a section had been chipped off them, by a shaft of brilliant yellow. Velazquez had not invented such effects; many others must have seen them before him, but few had had the energy or the talent to capture them and transform them into communicable experience. Like an explorer with a new continent, Velazquez had, for van Gogh at least, given his name to a discovery in the world of light.
Van Gogh ate in many small restaurants in the centre of Aries. Their walls were often dark, and the shutters closed against the bright sunlight outside. One lunchtime, he wrote to his brother to announce that he had stumbled upon something utterly Veläzquez-ian: ‘The restaurant in which I am sitting is very strange. It is grey all over… a Velazquez grey—as in the Spinning Women—and there is even a very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight coming through a blind, just like the one that slants across Velazquez's picture. … In the kitchen are an old woman and a short, fat servant also in grey, black, white… it's pure Velazquez.'
It was for van Gogh the mark of every great painter to enable viewers to see certain aspects of the world more clearly. If Velazquez was his guide to grey and to the coarse faces of large cooks, then Monet was his guide to sunsets, Rembrandt to morning light and Vermeer to adolescent girls (‘A perfect Vermeer,' he exclaimed to Theo after he spotted one example near the arena). The sky over the Rhone after a heavy rain shower reminded him of Hokusai, the wheat of Millet and the young women in Saintes-Maries de la Mer of Cimabue and Giotto.
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