Sixteen 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; he was raring to go. But I saw a view that struck me with awe.
Those blue hills beyond the Monongahela River have a name, but I still do not know what it is. I avoided their name on purpose. 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 know that if I wanted to, I could have visited there. Yet, I never did – I left those blue remembered hills alone, untouched on the horizon.
Over the eons, I am certain those hills have had several names, but for me they have none. 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.”
To name those blue remembered hills, or to dissect their geological history might lose what I first saw there. What if I simply left it unspoken?
In many cases, I am uncomfortable with things that remain unspoken. As a novelist, my whole goal is to give some sort of physical representation to the invisible stories in my head. Yet, as soon as I write a story, I can feel that I have lost something essential about it. Unwritten stories have infinite possibilities, which must be sacrificed as soon as they are fashioned into 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. Stars are nature’s distant horizon. I wanted to become closer to those rare experiences of utter awe I experienced in dark, misty fields staring up at infinite skies. Despite knowing most of the names of the constellations, one day I purposely disoriented myself and randomly stared at one star alone and wondered: how many thousands of years that light took to reach my eye. What was happening in that corner of the universe as the light left there on its odyssey? I tried and failed to wrap my head around distances and concepts that were clearly too large for me. I considered how the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Romans must have named that star, and had assigned to it the highest names they could conjure, names of gods and goddesses. They used names of invisible majesty and nameless awe, and despite our advances in technology and knowledge, we are no better at naming the nameless. So I chose to leave those blue Monongahela hills nameless, because they were like icebergs, almost all of them sat beneath my sight.
Some people respond with anxiety to the idea that anything is beyond naming or conception, and for a time I was one of them. As a high school freshman I would devour university level textbooks about astronomy. Yet, the more I learned the more my interest waned. I realized that, at least for me, the math was papering over the majesty of the reality. I was murdering as I dissected. Of course, I am in no way saying that astronomers hands are dripping with the blood of awe! Not at all!
If I see far it is because I stand on their shoulders. But, for me, I couldn’t keep on dissecting the stars, I wanted access to that experience I sometimes had while watching them. I was greedy for unlimited awe, but memorizing tables and charts did not give me the grasp that I sought.
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 a brief moment those distant hills pulled me toward them with intense gravity and I hoped to orbit something transcendental if I approached close enough. 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 hoped to find in the stars. Joy. I also tried to find joy in Australia. Yet, after returning from my study year abroad in Australia, I slowly learned of the pitfalls of using every awesome object in nature only as a springboard for the invisible. My thinking became cluttered. Once I had relied upon the disciplined thinking of the scientists who penned my textbooks. Now the awesome size and complexity of nature had me so focused on the forest that I was missing the trees. The forest of the unseen is vast and it is not nameless for lack of trying. The pages of history are rife with examples of minds just like mine who had tried to map this invisible forest. They failed, and so did I.
But why had I even attempted it? Perhaps because I was an anxious kid, a frequently uprooted military brat with books for friends. Maybe the blame rests on my beloved and tattered astronomy book that I devoured over and over as a seven year old.
In it there was a picture of our sun. It was pictured as the size of this dot, • compared with another picture of a Red Super Giant that was so large it could not even fit on the page, there was only a partial curve of its vast circumference fit along its edge. This was one of the first places I can remember finding Lewis’ joy, and it comforted me. I could close my eyes and imagine it – a star so big that millions and millions of suns could fit inside it. I would retreat inside the safety of that awe, and inside my head I could imagine entire universes.
I forget the exact moment when I decided to be an astronomer. It must have been some point close to the time when the Air Force transferred my family to RAF Feltwell in Norfolk, England. Driving there, I saw farms and hedges, hedges and farms and then more farms. We had to wait for several minutes at a railroad crossing for a rusted old train loaded with tons of muddy and misshaped sugar beets.
The Christmas before we left, I received a little red telescope. As soon as we moved in, I unpacked my telescope and when night fell, I struck out into the late fall chill. About a quarter of a mile away from my home I found an unlit football pitch, spread out a towel and stared up. It was fall and to me that meant that my favorite constellation, Orion, would rise earlier and dominate the horizon just in time for my birthday. I saw the moons of Jupiter circle the planet. I saw the hazy rings of Saturn. I saw the clusters of stars in the Pleiades. When I stopped feeling my toes, I packed up my telescope and went inside.
On special occasions, my family would drive an hour or so to Cambridge to shop. Often for nostalgia’s sake we would eat at the McDonald’s. (I had never imagined that dining at a fast food restaurant, so ubiquitous in the states, could ever become something to anticipate.) Lucky for me, McDonald’s stood next door to Blackwell’s bookshop. Inside its tangled forest of books hid dozens of wooden paneled nooks: cubbies crammed with books. Gravity pulled me straight toward the astronomy section where I buried myself in college level texts with all the really exciting new information. Secretly, like Victor Frankenstein, I hoped to discover some truly secret arcane knowledge buried in within their reams of pages. Instead, I quickly found my knowledge and vocabulary lacking. So I taught myself astronomy while hunched over a stack of books. When real scientists intruded into my tiny nook, I would shuffle my stack of books into a corner and hope they left soon.
For my birthday I usually received one of these college textbooks. The books seemed like animals in cages on my bookshelf, out of their natural element, but I read them anyway. They were far more interesting than the assigned reading from my high school. As the texts increased in difficulty they became nothing more than lists, margins with magnitudes, Right Ascension, seconds of arc, Azimuth, the First Point of Aries, Declination and more numbers. They used complex math. I learned the purpose of each of these categories and in good faith I obsessively struggled to understand this mathematical jargon.
One night when I was looking up into the night sky and locating the constellation Draco with its correct right ascension and declination for my latitude, I suddenly realized I was no longer doing what I loved. I needed the awe of the stars, but I actually was not all that interested in the math of the stars.
It was only years later, during my walk through Frick Park with my dog that I finally started to understand that these odd experiences of awe found me, I could not search them out. I could only cultivate a smattering of discipline in the realm of words so that I could attempt to better express what I sometimes experienced.
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, years later, I wrote this essay about my blue remembered hills, while still granting them the respect of remaining nameless.
G.K. Chesterton wrote:
It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields.
But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets.
To conquer these places is to lose them.
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.
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.
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 cookie tin that awakened a brief, if sickeningly intense, transcendental hunger for something nameless.
It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? not certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past... and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased.
Perhaps, if I am ruthlessly honest, I quit astronomy out of idealistic laziness. Math does not kill awe. Seeking to control kills awe. Math is merely a tool, just as words are for the writer. Like tongs and a poker in a fireplace, our tools can snuff or stoke wonder.
As a writer, my goal is to trigger awe in you. I never have been able to control my own experiences of awe but I can 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. In that moment, my mountains were both themselves and something else.
I found joy again on the other side of the planet. The dark eucalypti shaded us from the bright stars above. The headlights only lit a fraction of their trunks. We were driving to the summit to see a telescope. Then, I felt the dull thud of impact.
“What was that?” I said.
By the reflected lights from the eucalypti trunks, I saw where the thud came from. A kangaroo stood there, dazed. We had not hit him; he had leapt into us. No one has ever accused the kangaroo of being the smartest animal in Australia. He shook his head, confused, and hopped away back into the dark forest.
The driver, a fellow American, came to Australia to study astronomy eight years ago, and just never left. He looked very much like a younger Tim Robbins, and so for narrative’s sake his name will be Tim. He nearly always wore muted earth-toned sweaters which he insisted on calling jumpers. Before Tim and his wife drove to Coonabarabran to visit the Siding Spring Observatory they asked if I wanted to tag along. I jumped at the chance. After two months of studying abroad, I had not yet seen anything but Sydney.
Warrumbungles National Park is named for the aboriginal term for crooked mountains because the land there is littered with strange, crooked volcanic outcroppings. While Tim waited for the sun to set, he wandered its trails full of grey kangaroos and shy koalas. At the tail end of dusk, we started the drive up the narrow winding roads toward the peak where the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) sat. During the drive, Tim instructed the entire van in detail about the technical capacities of this telescope.
“The AAT is nearly thirty years old with a 3.9 meter mirror that is the largest in Southern Hemisphere. It sits nearly 1100 meters above sea level,” Tim said.
By the end of the trip I had heard too many facts about the AAT. I wanted to actually see its vast dome rising up into the austral sky.
As all visitors must, Tim dimmed his headlights long before reaching the peak. The van crept in darkness along the road that approached the telescope.
As the van approached, a guard from the gate walked out to talk.
“Hello. What brings you folks up here, tonight?” His polite tone carried an undertone of suspicion.
Tim explained that his friend and colleague was working in the AAT that night. The guard allowed us access. I felt like a secret package smuggled into a top-secret area. I was relieved that the guard didn’t question me personally. If he had, I probably would have nervously chattered about the kangaroo that ran into us.
The astronomers inside the AAT were busy but Tim’s friend came out to meet us. After pleasantries were exchanged he took us up on the shaky aluminum walkway that spiraled around the massive dome. As the astronomers within targeted different stellar objects the entire dome would twist slowly with a rumble of invisible gears. I would not say that I have a fear of heights but standing on a rickety walkway atop a moving dome perched on a precipice – well, let’s say, I held firmly onto the handrails. But as I came near to the top, I saw it. The most brilliant sky I have ever seen in my life.
The Milky Way looked like a highway full of brilliant headlights. The Southern Cross was nearly as bright as the absent moon. The Magellanic Clouds, once thought to be the closest galaxies to our own, hung clearly visible like a smudge on the sky.
The cliché says that night skies make you feel insignificant. I think for me, rather than feeling small, I felt mortal. I looked toward light that had taken hundreds or thousands of light years to reach us. I knew for a fact that I would never see the light leaving those objects now. I was watching ancient history that night. We often cope with our mortality by ignoring it. Looking at that night sky, I could not ignore it. Swimming in a sea of evidence for the ancient universe, I felt terrified and exhilarated.
I stood in awe.
The aluminum railing reverberated, making a thin hum, as the telescope below rumbled to life again. The vibrating walkway pulled me back to earth. I realized it felt quite cold and Tim and the others had already descended the stairway.
It was time for me to come back to earth.
I am now resigned to the fact that the great forest of the unspoken is 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: “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 at the risk of losing ourselves in labyrinths of the false infinite.”
Rather than a negation, I prefer Lewis’ term: Joy.
[Previously published as “Awestruck” in The Able Muse (Winter 2018).]
Ooh, thanks for that wonderful Chesterton phrase, "with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets."
Beautiful Sam, just beautiful, heartfelt insight into yourself, even poetic without the dissection of format. It helps me understand how a doctor can get calloused dealing with factual details of reality, rather than the wonderful, awesome joy of the living human constellation. Thanks for the insightful gain of not dissecting out the factualness of details and thereby losing the joy of living in the reality and meaning of the bigger picture. Count it ALL JOY!