It has always seemed to me there are two kinds of people, mountain people and ocean people. Those for whom the mountains present an irresistible pull and those for whom the shores beckon.
As a Midwesterner, I’ve never had one or the other bred into my bones, although I believe the flat horizons of the plains provide an ocean-like quality to what might otherwise be sheer monotony. Everything lingers in the open expanse; dawn hints at the day’s presence long before the sun itself emerges while dusk hovers in the sky like a child holding its breath well after the last sliver of sun drops below the horizon.
Even after half a lifetime away from the Midwest, when I step off a plane or get out of the car in those flat places, something in me expands with the horizon. I breathe more deeply, my eyes roam more leisurely.
Now I live in a valley. Night falls with the abruptness of someone pulling a shade down over a window. Morning arrives brash and bold like a fanfare of trumpets. Everything is more compressed and dramatic; black or white with fewer shades of gray. Not that I can’t or don’t appreciate the mountains—I do—but more as an expression of awe, not familiarity, of grandeur rather than grace.
Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels that way. In Thomas Mann’s epic Buddenbrooks, a novel I read during college a lifetime (or two) ago, the head of the Buddenbrooks family delivers a moving passage as he stands on a pier looking out over the water. Now, Thomas Buddenbrooks is admittedly having a difficult time. His son and heir has died, his family is no longer the powerful and prosperous force it had been in his youth.
“I’ve learned to love the sea more and more–perhaps I preferred the mountains at one time only because they were so much farther away. I wouldn’t want to go there now . . . What sort of people prefer the monotony of the sea, do you suppose? It seems to me it’s those who have gazed too long and too deeply into the complexity at the heart of things and so have no choice but to demand one thing from external reality: simplicity…A man climbs jauntily up into the wonderful variety of jagged, towering, fissured forms to test his vital energies, because he has never had to spend them. But a man chooses to rest beside the wide simplicity of external things, because he is weary from the chaos within.”
I remember little about the novel but have kept the book since college with this page folded down. While I never remember exactly what it says, the image that comes to mind when I think about it remains unforgettable.
Mann wrote Buddenbrooks when he was just 26 years old and sealed his reputation as a major literary force in Germany. The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, and Doctor Faustus were still to come. So was the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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