Customer Reviews

Mountain Gloom And Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics)

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This book is my favorite book. I remember the first time that I read it. I would have to get up from my desk, walk around my apartment, and digest what I was reading. It was so exciting.

Nicolson brings together Theology, History of Science and Geology, and Aesthetics in such a beautiful way. She describes what was an important change in western thinking about nature that occured at the end of the seventeenth century.

Ignore, William Cranon's introduction that ties Nicolson's work to today's ecocriticism. But find and read other works that study nature and culture; Clarance Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967), Arthur O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being (1936), and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden (1964).

Over the past 40 years I have returned to this work again and again. I have lectured on it and referred a lifetime of students to it. To learn that there were peoples who saw mountains as hideous scars marring the face of the sacred never failed to inspire reflection upon the too easily digested metaphor.

I paint images of wild places where I have been. To me, they are the most beautiful and uplifting sights I have ever seen. However, visitors to my studio ofter appear ill at ease or uncomfortable in the presence of these paintings. I wanted to know why. I saw this title and bought it and read it to answer the question.

This book really explained the basis and history of the common man's feelings when confronted by mountains. Opinions and attitudes at different times in history are defined and put into the context of contemporary religious, philosophical and literary teaching. The extensive footnotes led me to other sources as well.

From this, I gathered that it is the very infinity of the spaces and the feeling of helplessness that man feels in their presence that creates the Mountain Gloom and the same sublime infinity that is deemed aesthetic that creates the Mountain Glory. However, I could be misinterpreting the author. I still don't understand my visitors' reactions to my images, unfortunately, but I now have more clues.

Beautifully documented and lush with illustrative poetry, a scholarly book to read and reread. I wish it had some visual images however.