Refreshed and Restored

Now that I am back home, I must think about how the Romantic authors viewed their own homecomings to places like London and Paris. Leaving the fresh mountain air and breathing again the smog of the city, I feel connected to the idea of the mountains as a cleansing and transformative place. The act of travelling, almost as much as the destination itself, has filtered my thoughts and body, as well as my mind.

The Romantics were all about the travel, the process of removing oneself from "home" and going to a place of otherness. This causes the place of comfort and stability to be held in contrast to new and different surroundings. By seeing the ways the Alps differed from Cincinnati, I can see what the Romantics were getting at by trying to get back to nature.

The re-emerging views of nature as a sentient life force, as seen in Percy Shelley's "Mont Blanc," are part of the Romantics new manifesto. Percy shows the wilderness as having

"...a mysterious tongue
which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
so solemn, so serene that man may be
but for such faith with nature reconciled."

Far from saying that modern Switzerland is still a wilderness, we could still see the rawness of the earth, untouched by the hands and machines of man. Coming home and flying over subdivisions and shopping malls, I can see how necessary it was for a removal from all we are familiar with to get the real meaning behind what the Romantics were saying. While I have been to parks and caves, I have never before spent so much time completely surrounded by all that Switzerland offered; forests, mountains, and streams completely true to their geologic birth.

The doubt and faith Shelley talks about is the idea that this planet on which we live lives under us. It is a breathing, moving, changing entity that has as equal a hand in our lives as any deity man has imagined. The Romantics saw in Switzerland a cathedral to nature, and made pilgrimages there to worship and study its power.