Into the Mountains

There’s a myth of the ancient Chinese hermit. A lone mountain recluse, bent over and wizened with long grey hair living in rocky caves. This image is perpetrated in the west for that is how we see a recluse. Someone shunning society. The actual tradition is much richer. We don’t have anything comparable in the west for we tend to view societal seclusion as a breaking of the unspoken communal code of conduct, we simply don’t do that kind of thing. Those that do are viewed as eccentrics, loners unable to follow that social pact. In the ancient east, it was a relinquishing of political maneuvering in favor of a mountain hermitage, to seek the timeless pursuits of calligraphy, painting or poetry. To contribute artistically and morally to the benefit of a culture. These hermitages were not done in isolation. More akin to a Kerouac narrative of drunkenly arguing aesthetics with friends than an escape from society. Out of this came art and art is the highest cultural achievement a society can pursue. Of this era, beyond the Confucian ideal, it is to the art we enshrine and flock to museums to experience. Economics, politics, technology are necessary for sure, but it is in the arts that humanity is best defined.

What does this contemporarily mean. I have no idea. All my life I’ve had fantasies of societally divesting myself and living simply in the mountains. I do not mean this from the western point of view of renouncement or isolation, but of the quiet observation that is the natural offshoot of relinquishing oneself from the cultural race. This is why Thoreau is so often misunderstood. It was never about seclusion, it was always about the slow observation of man, society and beauty of nature. That he ate meals on Sunday at his mothers house is irrelevant. Mary Oliver understood this, understood it all too well while she walked the coastal dunes of Cape Cod. Her poem The Old Poets of China perfectly epitomizes this.

“Wherever I am, the world comes after me.

It offers me its busyness. It does not believe

that I do not want it. Now I understand

why the old poets of China went so far and high

into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.”