The Desert Year

From a Mountaintop

Chapter Eight From a Mountaintop From a Mountaintop In the legends of the saints and the prophets, either a desert or a mountain is pretty sure to figure. It is usually in the middle of one or on the top of the other that the vision comes or the test is met. To give their message to the world they come down or come out, but it is almost invariably in a solitude, either high or dry, that it is first revealed. Mos~s and Zoroaster climbed up; Buddha sat down; Mohammed fled. Each in his own way had to separate himself from men before he could discover what it was that he had to say to mankind. In a "wilderness" (Near Eastern and therefore certainly xeric) Jesus prepared himself for the mountaintop from which he would reject the world which Satan 123 FROM A MOUNTAINTOP would offer. Loneliness is essential and loneliness, it would seem, is loneliest where the air is either thin or dry and nature herself does not riot too luxuriously. If plato was satisfied with no more than a grove in Athens, that was because he was already halfway to the mere college professor. Yesterday, when I stood on a peak and looked down at an arid emptiness, I felt on my shoulders an awful responsibility. Under such circumstances as these, said I to myself, other men have grown wise. Only a few before me have ever had the double advantage of mountain and desert. It is now or never. If THE ANSWER is ever to be whispered into my willing ear, this should be the moment. No awful presence-I hasten to add-handed me any tablets of the law. Neither did Satan appear to offer me the world, and if he had done so I might, for all I can really know, have taken him up. Yet it did seem that I saw something with unusual clearness and that I came down not quite empty-handed. From where I stood there was no visible evidence that the earth was inhabited. Like some astronomer peering through a telescope at the planet Mars, I could only say, "It might be." It was thus the world must have looked at the end of the fifth day, and I found myself wondering whether the text of Genesis might not pOSSibly be garbled; whether, perchance, it was really after the fifth, not after the sixth day, that God 124 FROM A MOUNTAINTOP looked at his work and saw that it was good. Would not I, in His place, have stopped right there? Would I have risked the addition of a disturbing element? Was the world ever again so obviously good? But God's decisions are, by definition, wise, and presumably He knew what He was dOing. Perhaps, as some have fancied, He wanted one more projection of Himself to contemplate. Perhaps, as the deists supposed , man is an essential link in that Great Chain of Being which stretches unbroken from the most imperfect up to perfection itself. But in any event, here we are! And here, too, are others, sometimes exasperatingly like us, sometimes exasperatingly different. With ourselves and with these others we must somehow deal. If one could stay on the mountaintop there would be no problem. To be wise there would be easy. Poetry and philosophy, self-generated, would suffice. But for reasons psychological as well as physical, that we cannot do. Sooner or later we must come down and mingle more or less intimately with populations more or less dense. Men we must meet, and when we meet them we meet Problems. The wisdom found on the mountaintop is not a sufficient guide in the populous lowlands. We must reckon with something which, up there, existed only in the mind or the memory. But if wisdom, complete and adequate, cannot be brought down, there is something which can and that 125 FROM A MOUNTAINTOP something is to be found nowhere else. Only from such distance can man be seen either in perspective or in his real context, and it is the absence of that context which invalidates all the solutions to human problems formulated-as today all such solutions are -in no context except that of men's own making. Without this perspective and this context, philosophy and religion degenerate into sociology...