'The First to Climb a Mountain Because It Is There'

On this date in 1336, just for the hell of it, Francesco Petrarca (we know him as Petrarch), his brother Gherardo and two servants climbed to the 6,263-foot summit of Mount Ventoux in Provence. Morris Bishop, Vladimir Nabokov’s closest friend at Cornell, writes in Petrarch and His World (1963): 

“The decision was far more original than it would appear today. There is no clear record that anyone ever climbed a mountain for pleasure or mere curiosity from the time of King Philip of Macedon to that of Petrarch. . . . [He] remains the first recorded Alpinist, the first to climb a mountain because it is there.”

 

How wonderful that we can identify the first recreational mountain climber, and that he is a great poet and scholar, one of the enduring figures of the Italian Renaissance. In a letter to his friend and confessor, the monk Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro, Petrarch later wrote: “My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years; for, as you know, I have lived in this region from infancy, having been cast here by that fate which determines the affairs of men.” Petrarch here sounds remarkably like our contemporary, someone moved not by necessity but a spirit of adventure.

 

Petrarch had read in Livy’s History of Rome that King Philip of Macedon climbed Mount Hemus in present-day Bulgaria because he wished to know if the Black Sea and the Adriatic were both visible from the peak. Bishop writes of Petrarch’s letter: “It also expresses for the first time that mountain-awe which has become a commonplace of human feeling, as of literature.” Whether or not Petrarch was the first mountain climber is unimportant. It’s his willingness to act on the itch of curiosity that endears him to me, coupled with the discipline of an eighteen-hour journey up and down the mountain. I’m not certain Petrarch experienced a Keats-like “mountain-awe,” a suspiciously Romantic-sounding rapture for a man to feel in the fourteenth century.

 

He was a man of his time. While at the summit of Mount Ventoux, Petrarch read a pocket-sized edition of St. Augustine’s Confessions, a gift from Dionigi, to whom he writes:

 

“Where I fixed my eyes first, it was written: ‘And men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean and the revolutions of the stars - and desert themselves.’ [Confessions, x.8.15] I was stunned, I confess. I bade my brother, who wanted to hear more, not to molest me, and closed the book, angry with myself that I still admired earthly things.”

 

Bishop’s gloss is modern and secular: “In the rarefaction of the upper air his heightened sensibility stirred him to egotistic examination of his own state. In a devout mind such thought can only be religious. Most religion is egotistic.”

 

I encourage readers to look into Bishop (as well as Petrarch), who wrote biographies of Cabeza de Vaca, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and Ronsard, and much light verse. You can understand why that coupling of qualities – scholarship and a lively sense of humor – would attract Nabokov. I found Bishop’s column, “Literature for the Mass and Literature for the Elite,” in the February 1959 issue of something called The South-Central Bulletin of the Modern Language Association. In it he writes:

 

“I ask of literature that it tell me something I did not know and that I want to know; or that it reveal meanings, especially beautiful meanings, in familiar experience. I have little time to waste on books that are good for you but not for me.

 

“And so I report that [James Gould] Cozzens’ By Love Possessed was, for me, an illuminating, rewarding, nourishing book. But Cozzens is a mass-writer. Per contra, I take an eminent elite-writer, Ezra Pound. By every test I have learned to apply, Pound, in his Cantos is a pretentious, phony idiot, who has nothing to tell me that I want to listen to.”