The Other Side of Fear

Written a few days ago -- but I still feel relieved!
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Relief. It is a strange feeling. It is not one I have ever had the chance to evaluate at length, but I have been feeling, and thinking about, that particular emotion very much today. Today I received some news that I have been waiting for, but fearing would not come, since the end of June last year. To all the dear friends and family who have provided comfort since that time, this is my announcement that the best - as you told me it would! - rather than the worst has at last happened. In the first minutes after getting that news, I felt sheer joy - the kind of joy that leaves you shaking, and crying, and feeling as if you could take on anything in the world. But since then this joy has settled into something quieter, but no less marvellous. Relief.

Relief, I realise now, is the other side of fear. It is what you feel when reality has been turned on its head for a time, but then rights itself. And the longer reality has been the wrong way up, the more reconciled you had got to the prospect that you might not wake up from the nightmare - the purer, the deeper, and the more, well, odd the feeling of relief is. It's like having a huge bruise, that hurts when you touch it, but then suddenly one day, though you can still see the bruise turning from purple to green, it doesn't hurt no mutter how hard you press at it. Throughout today, I have kept pressing away at the bruise I had got so used to, but there is no pain there any more. Just relief, and the promise, at last, of a future in a world the right way up.

It is hard to become unaccustomed to fear. Relieved as I am, I cannot help but think - surely this is temporary? Maybe there has been a mistake, and I'm just looking through a maze of mirrors, which make the world look the right way round, but in reality it is still topsy-turvy? But no. The relief, which is just beginning to work on healing the wounds of fear, says otherwise. It is real. The only thing to fear now is fear itself.

Relief, the release from fear, is not a steady emotion. It is like a calm ocean. It has no crashing waves, but it swells every now and then, filling your heart and splashing its salty liquid into your eyes.

Quite simply, I am relieved. And, humble, overlooked, and undramatic though that emotion may be, it is one of the best things I have felt since the end of June last year.

The Strangeness of the Past

For my MPhil in Early Modern History I am writing a thesis on the subject of early modern reactions to mountains and (if and when it happened) mountain-climbing. Right now, that means trawling through Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, first published in English in 1684. This text has been used by scholars over the past sixty years or so as an exemplar of the allegedly universal early modern 'distaste' for mountains, but it is far more than that, if it reveals such at all. It is nothing less than one man's attempt to explain the physical realities of the earth by sketching its history, from Creation, to the Flood, and beyond.

Sometimes, when I have been working on a particular historical figure for a long period of time, I get to wondering what it would be like to meet them. I would definitely like to go for a drink with Sandy Irvine, for example, the 22 year-old Oxonian who died on Everest in 1924. His letters are witty, slightly cheeky, excited in tone and often badly spelt. I imagine he would be the kind of person who would tell wicked stories all evening, and who might flirt a little with girls, but always politely. Elizabeth Elstob, an early seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxonist whose letters I edited a year or so ago, would I think probably be quite trying company, at least in her later years, although through no fault of her own. In her letters one gets the sense of a woman for whom life held a great deal of melancholy, and a succession of unfulfilled promises. I think she would fill an encounter with a sympathetic ear with slightly mournful reminisces of days gone by.

Thomas Burnet, on the other hand, would be an infuriating person to spend an evening with. I envisage him as the kind of older man you might end up drawn into after-dinner conversation with, who has the smile of one who believes he has all the answers. And the problem is, he does.

I am only halfway through the first book (of, heavens help me, four), but thus far I cannot help but feel impressed by Burnet's theory. In a nutshell, it is this: the Bible, he points out, tells us that when the Flood (or, as he terms it, the Deluge) occurred, waters rose to above the tops of the mountains. As far as Burnet is concerned, this just can't be possible: there isn't enough water in the oceans or in the clouds to cover the tops of the mountains. So his answer is that the mountains could not have existed until after the Deluge - that, indeed, they were the result of it.

This simple totting up of cubits of water on Burnet's part has some interesting ramifications. He argues, next, that the ante-deluvian (pre-Flood) Earth was in the shape of a 'mundane Egg', with the fiery centre as the yolk, a watery 'Abysse' as the white, and a layer of Earth as the shell. So how, the reader asks, did all that water get out? I can answer that, says the all-knowing, infuriating Burnet: the Sun's heat gradually caused vapours to be released from the waters of the Abyss, and eventually these vapours broke out of the shell - causing the surface of the earth to crack, flooding it with water, and causing mountains to form.

The thing that really gets me about this is that, taken entirely on its own terms, it... well, it fits. My know-it-all after dinner companion has laid out a jigsaw which seems impossible and then manages to fit it together perfectly. If I didn't know the things I do know, thanks to having been born in the 21st-century rather than the 17th, I might almost be tempted to think he was right.

This, I think, is the real challenge with exploring the thinking of the past. By modern standards, Burnet's Sacred Theory is mad, silly, even. But for all that I sometimes find myself wanting to reach through my computer screen and strangle the man for being so unflappably, even smugly, convinced of his own correctness, I also cannot forget that I have a fairly considerable advantage over him. At one point, he talks about what the Earth would look like from the Moon. To me, in 2013, this seems a commonplace - images of the Earth from space abound (often on Facebook, with inspirational quotes beneath...), after all - but for Burnet, in 1784? That was a huge leap of imagination. His entire theory is an immense feat of imagination. From two sources - his observations of the world in its 'current' form, and Scripture - he then went on a journey of the mind to seek out the deep history of the earth. 

The ideas of the past may seem strange sometimes, and they may even be wrong by modern standards, but we must not forget that once, they seemed to some to be feasible, or even genius.