Things That Explanation Could Not Ruin

On disenchantment and a mountain.

Most people would say that the walking was the hardest part—we covered 103 miles and ascended 32,000 feet as we looped through France, Italy, and Switzerland—and the walking was certainly taxing. At altitudes over 8000 feet, my heart fluttered like a frantic bird, and I gulped at the inadequate air without ever getting enough of it. Our legs were sore, and we were furiously hungry. But the looking was even more strenuous than the walking. I’d trained for the hike, but nothing could have prepared me for the almost intolerable onslaught of beauty. My looking was a net, and precious things kept slipping through.

The rhythm was simple. We woke, we walked, we looked, we slept; we woke, we walked, we looked, we slept. We did it over and over, occasionally stopping to eat cheese and bread, only sometimes showering, for a total of ten days. Autumn was encroaching, making uneven inroads, and the days themselves were violently unalike—some swaddled in cloud, some searing with sun, and once at the top of a col there were great slashing gusts of snow. We walked across lush valleys and clambered over ledges where nothing grew. One morning we saw a herd of ibex daintily crossing an outcropping. Cows nosed the grass, producing stinking pats of shit, making doleful expressions. We dipped down into villages where the houses had wooden shutters and then climbed back up into the rocks and the mist. There was mud, clots of it clinging to our shoes, and puffs of reddish dust. The wind was so wild at a particularly exposed point that it ripped the rainproof cover off my pack and swirled it out of my hands. Light glinted off the crinkled blue ice of the glaciers. Light faded, light sharpened and scoured, light burned our skin and cracked our lips. In a rare sunless hour there was an improbably perfect rainbow. Yet no matter how different the days were, the rhythm of waking, walking, looking, and sleeping persisted. It was the eternal form of our lives, simple and ceaseless. Never mind that we had spent years prior doing lesser things. Perhaps from now on we would only ever do this.

The feathery purple flowers called Fireweed. The furrows of creased black rock. What else? Monstrous slugs longer than my hand. Moving white dots, which were sheep. Deep green scoops, which were valleys. What else? Time both slowing and hastening, above all taking on a distinctive texture. Annihilating bouts of dreamless sleep. The rose of the sun rising and pinking the mountains. What else? Above all, the imperviousness of everything to our awe.

---

“The process of disenchantment is irreversible,” the philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in 2011, reprising his customary lament. Taylor is the foremost contemporary proponent of a familiar story, which comes to us by way of the sociologist Max Weber (who wrote of Entzauberung, literally de-magicking, and was himself riffing on the poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, who wrote of Entgötterung, literally de-divinization). The story goes something like this. Once, the world was enchanted; then, because of some combination of Cartesian philosophy and Enlightenment-era science and industrial advances, in short because of that unstable and sprawling phenomenon so clumsily subsumed under the term “modernity,” it was drained of its magic. Religion, too, was an agent of disenchantment, albeit a slow and partial one. The world in which each tree or river was inhabited by a spirit or a nymph was gradually supplanted by a more orderly world of demons and angels, then by a yet more orderly world of stringent monotheism, and finally by the sterility of secularism. Now, the story concludes, we are confined to a universe of dead matter.

According to Taylor, the enchanted world had two primary features. First, it was “filled with spirits and moral forces, and…these forces impinged on human beings.” In addition to the usual workings of cause and effect, there were magical emanations—spells and curses that blessed or doomed us at a distance, auras that acted on us without touching us. Hauntings were common; there were portents and talismans and evil eyes. Second, meaning inhered in the world, not merely in its observers. It was not a product of human operations but a property of reality. “Power resided in things,” Taylor writes. A flower or a rock—these meant something, regardless of what we thought about them, regardless of whether we thought about them at all. But now that the old enchantments have become irrecoverable, now that bodies are constellations of atoms and mountains are heaps of molecules, meaning is an external imposition.

There are learned objections to Taylor's story, and to their number I wish to add an objection of a looser sort. I suppose I might call it a spiritual objection, a failure of fundamental recognition. Taylor writes gloomily, “the combination of Weberian rationalization and post-Galilean science, with the accompanying decline of religion, has left us with a world deprived of meaning, and offering no consolation.” What, I wonder, is he talking about? The world itself is a refutation. It is nothing but consolation. It is so much more beautiful than it has to be.

Even the desiccating explanations provided by modern science are not all that deflating. For how much do we really learn when we discover that one event causes another, that Mont Blanc was created by the clash of tectonic plates, that glaciers gouged out the valleys? Schopenhauer writes, “the connection between cause and effect is really just as mysterious as any connection imagined to hold between a magic incantation and the spirit it seems to conjure up.” He is right.

But more importantly, there are things that explanation could not ruin, even if it were not quite so occult. As Bruce Robbins puts it, “perhaps meaning is something that one simply cannot not have.” A small thing like modernity could hardly eliminate it. The world has always had other ideas. Everywhere there are little rips in the dull fabric of the usual. No amount of knowledge about the Alps could disenchant them. In fact, learning about them is only a futile attempt to access them more completely, to do something with their immensity, to make it bearable or at least transform it into the sort of thing we can touch.

We mutter to babies that we want to eat them up, but we settle for holding them; the mountains are too big to hold, so we Google their names and learn that to the left of Mont Blanc is Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey, one of the most grueling peaks to climb, first summitted by Henry Seymour King in 1885, and to its right is Mont Maudit, literally “cursed mountain,” itself a stronghold of dark magic. But knowing this does nothing to diminish the massif. How could it?

In fact, knowing this doesn’t do much of anything at all, besides help us pass the idle hours when we sit after dinner waiting to walk again. By the time we are looping back down into the towns back up into the gnarled rock, the names of things no longer matter. The names of things are only empty casings. What could they ruin? They are so flimsy beside these peaks as sheer and enduring as spires.