POINTS OF VIEWS
In his new book, The Pleasures of Leisure, Robert Dessaix stares into the void and contemplates the singular power of panoramas.
In his new book, The Pleasures of Leisure, Robert Dessaix stares into the void and contemplates the singular power of the panorama.
In a sense, every view offers us a hint of the sublime, surely – a rush of terror while staying safe.
Views, it is alleged,
came into being on 26 April 1336. Before that date, on which the Italian poet Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux in Provence simply to look at what could be seen from the top, there’s no evidence that anyone – any hermit or cowherd, any pilgrim or traveller – had ever looked out and down on the world just for the poetic feelings that might be aroused in them by what they saw. Or even at a lake or seascape. They must have, on countless occasions, but since there’s no evidence of it, the British art historian Kenneth Clark declared Petrarch to be the first man to climb a mountain for its own sake, and to enjoy the view from the top. Indeed, he declared him to be the first modern man. Nobody has bothered to argue with him.
Writing to a former confessor, Petrarch himself claimed that he’d climbed the highest mountain in that part of France for no other reason than to see what so great an elevation had to offer. He was dazed, he wrote, by the vast sweep of the view spread out before him. He claimed, as no mountain climber had ever claimed (in writing) before him, to have been “bent on pleasure” and anxious that his enjoyment should be “unalloyed”. (Leisure in a nutshell, really.) Before Petrarch, it seems, people surveyed the scene from an elevated position for a purpose: on the watch for enemy troops, to search for lost sheep, to keep an eye on what the neighbours were doing. In many parts of the world, people also climbed mountains to commune with the gods.
Nowadays, 700 years after Petrarch, looking at a view for its own sake is something we all indulge in whenever we get the chance. Planeloads, indeed trainloads of people arrive in Darjeeling every day to look at the view – nothing else, just look at it. At home we design and build houses specifically to provide what is termed a “stare view” from the living room and possibly a bedroom or two, although rarely any other part of the house – a bathroom with a view, for instance, is still considered an amusing eccentricity. When I’m at the weekender, at the desk in the living room, I often write looking at a nicely framed view of forested hills: it provides a sort of counterpoint to the busyness in my head, keeping me on the alert. Despite the fact that, as far as I can see, nothing much ever happens out there – a pair of black cockatoos might swoop past, screeching amicably, a curtain of rain might drift in from the west, obscuring the valley – looking at this vista provides me with a kind of second self without my moving an inch.
In Australia we have lookouts where you not only may but indeed are encouraged to stand and stare. Local councils often signpost them so that tourists driving by can stop, point their mobile phones at them and drive on inwardly refreshed. What is it, though, that traditionally refreshes us at a lookout?
In a sense, every view offers us a hint of the sublime, surely – a rush of terror while staying safe. Every view contains a dash, however faint, of the epiphanic. Even an ocean view on a calm, sunny day can provoke thoughts of what lurks beneath the waves: on the one hand, nothing at all, unending gloom; on the other, death from drowning, death from a lurking stonefish, death from a shark attack, death from a giant squid. Monsters or nothingness: in either case oblivion. Yet here on the beach or the headland we’re untouchable. On the edge of an escarpment in the Alps it’s much the same thing: staring out into the void we have thoughts of death from cold, or death from a fall, or death from an avalanche, or death from a suicidal leap, or, in the Himalayas, death from a sudden landslide or a pouncing snow leopard (rare but imaginable). Looking, we are two people. This is literally ecstasy: standing outside yourself in a direct sense.
A view can also provide a narrative, which looking across a plain cannot, especially if it’s carefully framed, as many of the panoramas offered by our lookouts are. Some even have a touch of theatre in the broadest sense of the word. The first view I can remember ever seeing as a child was at Echo Point in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney: hardly a drop at all by Nepalese or Swiss standards, but by my standards, as a six-year-old local, spine-tingling. It wasn’t just a matter of the sheer cliffs, the certainty of death if you slipped, the hostile bush-covered landscapes empty of life yet at the same time seething with death-dealing animals – well, snakes and spiders, anyway. It was the stories of the first explorers from a century and a half before, the thoughts of convict chain gangs, the questions about how the people on the farms we could make out far below us first settled there, how they got there, where the road was and who had built it.
There was a narrative, in other words, to dwell on, as there inevitably is along any coastline as well: of smugglers and pirates (if you’ve been reading Enid Blyton), shipwrecks, adventure, invasions, arrivals and departures. Again, you don’t get that – not really, not quite so dramatically – on the flat. On the flat – out walking in the country, for instance, looking at green folds in the landscape, perhaps at a river – you might get a pleasing prospect or two, but that’s not a view. Kevin McCloud, the presenter of Grand Designs, is forever declaring any greenish outlook with a tree and an old barn in it “spectacular”, but, living as I do in Tasmania, I am more demanding.
I don’t believe that we enjoy views, even commanding views (as they are revealingly called), principally because of the power they endow us with, as some theorists have suggested. Yes, in some cases we might have the illusion of omnipotence: looking out and down (as we do as a rule – rarely up) we see the world in miniature, like a model landscape we can refashion as we wish. In general, though, I think it’s subtler than that. I think views are a permitted way of looking because of the added pleasures they afford without inciting us to break rules or behave badly. Staring at the night sky is similar: it both amplifies your sense of who you are and annihilates you in the same instant – it is terrifying and magnificent, familiar and utterly alien. It is perfectly acceptable to stare at it in wonder. Not for long, of course, any more than you can stare at the sea or the view from Mont Ventoux for long before you start to feel empty and want to go home. There’s nothing more boring than the infinite. And spelling it with a capital “I” doesn’t make it any more appealing.
There is one quasi-magical thing you can do with a view that, oddly enough, is very like smoking: hang-gliding. It’s one of the things I truly regret never having tried and now never shall. High up near the Rohtang Pass in Himachal Pradesh, at several spots beside the road overlooking a heart-stopping sheer drop into the valley you’ve just driven slowly up from, there are groups of young men trying to stop your car and talk you into leaping off the edge into the void with one of them, borne aloft by a brilliantly coloured hang-glider. Vultures gather with a kind of morose hopefulness in small clutches on nearby boulders. It would, I know, have been one of the most euphorically transformative experiences I could ever have had. It would have left peering out over the Jamison Valley from the lookout at Echo Point seeming practically ho-hum. It would have wrenched Echo Point out of the sublime category and made it run of the mill. That is to say, in joyfully jumping out into the view, pinned under a swarthy instructor, for the first time in my life I could have died and not died simultaneously. I would have been doing both something momentous and absolutely nothing at all, and this, I would argue, is leisure at its most refined, its most enlightened.