"I mean, it broke what wasn't broken in there already:"

You know, I thought that last entry was a good place to quit, but all ya'll keep clicking, which I guess is the Internet 2.0 equivalent of an encore, hey? So anyway. Sort of a strange day. America tomorrow, job interview next week, a story of questionable quality being published in a respected literary journal sometime this summer. None of that is much worth talking about. Instead I will post the last section of the paper for my mountain class. I hope that it will make sense to you, as much as these past three and a half months can make sense, as much as anything we can find to tell ourselves in this short cycle of seasons we call our lives will make sense before, in our last lighted days, we find some comfort in concluding that that which we called "sense" is as much a construct of language as those things we sought to attribute to it. This was, more or less, the subject of my essay:

In May I come again and find Petřin Hill utterly changed. Everywhere the low ferns and flowering trees are exploding into blossom, and those once-uninterrupted views of the castle and of the two towns below it are now observed by the green of leaves, the blues and reds and yellows of budding flowers and the rushes of color from the flying birds, titmice and blackbirds lured by the scent of all this new weather, chased by the dogs whose winter dominance over the hill is again being challenged. Standing on the footbridge above the funicular track, heavy branches lean into my field of vision; I do not know if it is the leaves that have bent the branch, some sudden snowfall arrived before I had, or if this yearning is all on the part of the branch – if it, too, is stretching forward in search of a better view of this season-tugged beauty.

These things are not a surprise, not to anyone who has been paying attention, but to know a thing is there is not the same as to see it. Walking along a tree-tunneled Petřin path, I noticed a small green leaf floating down from the sky. I passed it by. A few meters later I came upon the same sight. This time I moved up next to it – no leaf at all, a green caterpillar was writhing there in mid-air, dancing to some arrhythmic, unknowable song; perhaps the same song hidden from me at Mácha’s Lake weeks before. I knew, I knew I knew, that it was hanging from a bit of silk, that it had come down from one of those overhanging trees shading the mid-morning sun from the path. But I could not see it, not for the life of me, not for all the molting, dancing caterpillars on all of Prague’s hills. Dillard spends an entire chapter of her narrative on “seeing.” No wonder: I saw five more caterpillars hanging from that same dangerous height just that morning, on just that path. What do you suppose we have eyes for, then?
*
In a letter to a friend, Thoreau wrote:

If you have been to the top of Mt. Washington, let me ask, what did you find
there?…Going up there and being blown on is nothing. We never do much climbing
while we are there, but we eat our luncheon very much as at home. It is after we
get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever. What did the mountain
say? What did the mountain do?

And I cannot help but think of my own travels in the Czech Republic this way. Is it enough that I went? I suppose that no, it is not enough. But I do not know how it is that I should come to climb this mountain, if I should even be so lucky as to find it.

But let’s say I do find it, that I climb it and come back to find my life changed, having climbed this spiritual mountain to match the physical one. What words will I use to describe this journey? Should I be describing it at all?

Thoreau wants to know what the mountain said, what it did; or at least, he claims he does. But I do not believe him. No, I think the real trick comes before, to come down from that mountain, physical or spiritual, and ask those questions. Whether you answer in your own words or those of someone else does not matter so much; indeed, it doesn’t matter if you answer at all. The thing is to ask.

And we need words for that. We can climb all the mountains we want, until we are blue in the face and bone-thin from exhaustion, but unless there is a way for us to articulate that mountain to ourselves, all we will really have succeeded in doing is getting ourselves blown on. Landscape can exist without humans, and language cannot – but man cannot exist in landscape without language. This is the first mountain we climb, the first journey we make; it is the one that allows all others.