Modern Times and wilderness in the European culture. From Chaplin to climbers, with Franco Brevini Franco Brevini
Modernity is destroying nature. The alarm bounces every day from the agendas of governments to the pages of newspapers. As we know, that process now seems to touch its dramatic climax, began with the start of industrial modernity itself, when there were many to believe that the works of man had ceased to increase the beauty of nature and that the new age that was opening was dedicated to the individualization. Among the extreme appearance of the ancien regime are numbered nobles scenarios set by painters such as Thomas Gainsborough: a country gentleman dressed in hunting, his wife crinoline in the shade of an oak tree and behind the charming arcadia of his property Rural. But suddenly, starting in the late eighteenth century, the unpoetic skyline of factories, towers, mines and waste coal begin to irreversibly ruining those picturesque landscapes.
Our village was one of the nicest you could see. I mean it was nice because it was so green and fresh and clean ... Then the wind carried a bouquet of flowers that had to be wild and sweet herbs that grew on the mountain. is a step of 'How Green Was My Valley' by Richard Llewellyn, from which John Ford in 1941 will draw his famous film. It is the story of a Welsh mining village of the late nineteenth century, but the atmosphere of irreparable destruction of an original Eden was the same one that had characterized much of the first industrial civilization and that is witnessed among others by the poet William Wordsworth and the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan.
Yet merely assert that modernity destroys nature, is to say only half the truth. The other half is rather formidable by antibodies expressed by the western culture. Exile of his artifice irrevocable modernity has in fact launched a new idea of \u200b\u200bnature, that has little to do with that handed down from classical antiquity. It is an idea that overwhelms all previous paradigms related to the perception della natura e che stabilisce un’irreparabile scissione tra mondo naturale e mondo storico.
Questa profonda trasformazione è testimoniata da una serie di indicatori, fra cui la legittimazione di due realtà naturali, che, a ben guardare, appaiono riconducibili alla medesima categoria estetica: il sublime. Dopo che per secoli letteralmente non erano stati visti, perché non rientravano in alcuno dei canoni percettivi correnti, alla fine del Settecento due nuovi fenomeni naturali fanno il loro ingresso nella cultura occidentale: le grandi montagne e le desolate distese dei ghiacci polari. La loro apparizione sulla ribalta della cultura europea, accanto al deserto, alla terrifica potenza del vulcano, al mare in tempesta, se per un to part of the process of evolution of aesthetics, on the other hand is one of the many responses to industrial decline. The more ordered the natural contours of the ancient civitas appears threatened by the advance of modern decay, the more he longs for a world of unadulterated purity: extreme, remote, untouchable. The two phenomena are related to such an extent that, of modernity, the climber or exploration in the ice are not less emblematic figures of Chaplin's Modern Times caught in the gears of the assembly line. They are merely the other side.
Confirmation of a link between the apparently so unexpected discovery of the wild and pristine and the destruction of the environment are numerous, but I would offer one to start with nothing short of sensational. I do not think has been done so far seen a very basic and for this puzzling why the discovery of the mountain and the birth place of climbing in England, that is, a country with no mountains truly worthy of the name and it is still far from the Alps? You do in England because it is in that area that the worship of nature is rooted trees, the taste for country houses, the parks and gardens for the love of pets, the practice of bird-watching the veneration for dogs and horses. But mainly because England is that the consequences of the industrial revolution were more alarming early.
A similar mechanism of compensation is found in love for the nature of the American world: just think of the enthusiasm for the wilderness and the unspoiled open spaces of Henry David Thoreau. We can recognize the typical myth of a civilization repairman responsible for having destroyed the deserts and grasslands. That the first national parks were born over there says a lot about this guilt complex.
For centuries, the mountains and the polar ice were heard as the alter orbis, emblems of threatening otherness and strangeness irrevocable. The mountain has been from time to time axis mundi, a magical place of conjunction of ground and otherworldly, as in the mountain of the Purgatorio of Dante or the Mount Analog Daumal. It formed the headquarters or the altar of the gods, such as Olympus or Sinai, or the place of vision and knowledge, as in the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. The mountains rise vertically from the center of the earth to heaven, and their axis is the axis cosmic symbol that represents the Spirit in shamanism. Rudolf Otto, the great German scholar of religions, wrote that the origin of the sacred is the 'absolutely different. " That is the radical difference, not to mention the idea of \u200b\u200bpower that you associate instead Mircea Eliade, che la montagna si candida precocemente a sede del sacro.
Ma non possiamo dimenticare la dimensione ctonia della montagna come dimora dei defunti o addirittura come luogo infernale, che ritroviamo nelle mitologie dei monts maudits sopravvissute fino a due secoli fa nel cuore dell’Europa. Ricordiamo che «montagne maledette» era il nome generico dell’intera catena del Monte Bianco prima della nascita dell’alpinismo.
Nei luoghi di produzione della cultura europea, fortemente centrata sul Mediterraneo, anche gli spazi del Nord fino dall’antichità sono stati invariabilmente sentiti come emblemi dell’altrove. E così l’immaginario settentrionale si è sviluppato in contrapposizione al suo opposto, il Sud dell’ecumene mediterranea, alimentando gli eterostereotipi più negativi: il Nord come luogo remoto, gelido, ostile, tempestoso, melanconico, repulsivo, perennemente invernale, spettrale, crepuscolare o notturno, solitario e inospitale. Perfino Dante lo recupererà nell’«eterna ghiaccia» del suo inferno: la lontananza da Dio si materializza nella vetrosa materia aquilonare.
La negatività era declinata anche in termini teratologici. Basta dare un’occhiata alla Carta Marina che Olao Magno pubblicò a Venezia nel 1539. Qui realtà e mito convivono e così, se la rappresentazione del territorio risulta per la prima volta abbastanza veritiera, i mari continuano a essere infested with monstrous creatures, fish bizarre shapes, some with whiskers and claws like lobster, others with a horn that emerges at the surface (they are narwhals) and others with the body covered with scaly armor. There are gigantic, spouting whales that swallow ships or sea snakes, the famous kraken, that the crush. Again, logs and treacherous ice floes drifting on which the float ursi albi, sinking ships, shipwrecks and remains of the vortex of the maelstrom, called horro caribdi. A deposit on a fabulous alone aquilonari districts also contributed to the excessive presence of phenomena such as iceberg, the aurora borealis, the magnetism that makes him crazy compass needles, the leviathans and unicorns.
From the mountains as the ice for centuries, men have thus maintained a prudent distance and reckless vengeance of a few isolated challenges is justified only with the wonder of those places that guarded treasures. In the case of mountains, crystals, or the coveted prey of hunting, the deer, the deer, the ibex, while in the North, amber, furs, whales, ivory.
Until the middle of the eighteenth century 'icy Alps and Canute "the famous sonnet by Galeazzo di Tarsia had represented that civilization and to cumbersome barriers to communications. At best, the poets were hailed as the providential "Screen / [...] between us and Germany's anger." A dire il vero senza molto successo, se secoli di invasioni e scorrerie avevano poi provveduto a riconvertirle nelle «mal vietate Alpi».
Come i ghiacci boreali, le montagne appartenevano alla natura ferina, che costituisce il grado più primitivo della creazione e il luogo dell’errore. Di nuovo ne sa qualcosa Dante, che si smarrisce nella «selva oscura». Silva è la traduzione latina del termine platonico chora e di quello aristotelico hyle. Entrambi rimandano all’idea della materia oscura e primordiale, di ciò che è intricato e negativo. Per secoli la selva è il luogo canonico dell’avventura e della perdita, come dimostrano i poemi cavallereschi o le fiabe, il paladino Orlando e Cappuccetto Red. And the sea is the frontier of discovery and meeting extraordinary research and sister in law of the land nondum dell'affiorare abyss.
positivity was associated to the cultivated landscape, the rolling fields of crops, the hill with the screw el'ulivo short, the place Hesiodic consecrated by the works and days of human work: the 'effects of good governance, "as it wants a famous fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. Until the eighteenth century only the plow could redeem the natural landscape. Nature had to be removed from mechanical randomness that governs it, redeeming it dall'istintualità and ferocity: a model of the same civilization. The emblem is Friday, the native of the novel by Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is torn from the savagery of cannibalism and addressed to the true religion.
"Beauty is not a property of real things"
For the mountains to enter the field of view of European culture, paving the way for the exploration of new space that we might call "vertical continent ', you will need to produce a deep change of paradigms, which falls around the middle of the eighteenth century and in the field of aesthetics can be summed up in the transition from picturesque to the sublime.
The interest in the world Hyperborean part of the same changing climate, even if the trips to the North had met a total of more frequent raids in the mountains hunting and cristalliers. Yet even in the case of northern travel must be distinguished. Until the nineteenth century, the kingdom of the ice path was not as the goal itself, but, on the one hand grasp for his mysterious wealth, the other in search of alternative routes to the markets of Eastern spices able to circumvent the Arab monopoly .
The search for passages to the north-east and north-west to the "grocery" in the Far East, a goal, it will be remembered, also of Columbus' journey, marked in a characteristic way the modern age, giving rise to the most dangerous and the most vain among the enterprises in the history of exploration. Only the first path in 1878-79 and between 1903 and 1905 the second, the two passages will prove just too cluttered with ice, too dangerous and too laborious to be effective routes for commercial navigation. Both have been used a bit 'more systematically only in the twentieth century is due to climatic reasons, both technological: the melting of Arctic ice on one side and the availability of powerful nuclear icebreaker on the other. In all cases, however, the banks of the floating ice shelf within which penetrate the sailors did not offer any attraction in itself. They were felt as painful human toll that the courage he had to pay to explore trade routes of high strategic interest.
This picture changes with the transition from the picturesque to the sublime, which finally overwhelms the ordained canons of classical aesthetics. Shifting the focus from the object to the natural person who perceives it, this transition marks a turning point and launches the idea of \u200b\u200bnature in which we are still immersed. If, to paraphrase Hume, the beauty is not a property of things in themselves, if what matters is rather the emotion of the subject, here is the realm of the aesthetic appearances of nature can unfold in hitherto unthinkable because immeasurable and grandiose , wild, excessive, terrifying and monstrous. Far beyond what is orderly and symmetrical, then everything can become aesthetically significant as long to stir emotion. From the sublime to the picturesque moderate irregularities in the irregularity leads to more extreme.
Beyond the aesthetic reasons, to ensure promotion to the wild have been the same reasons that pushed a time to condemn it. Just the wild and barbaric, who terrorized the man barricaded himself inside the walls of the city, comfort the lonely crowd today the megalopolis. In the nineteenth century we witness the takeoff of a rural-based popular sentiment, which, escaping the vicious Babylon built by industrial capitalism, celebrates the simple values \u200b\u200bof rural life and later mountain of Arcadia. In short, Heidi Tartarin not represent the other side of Gregor Samsa waving its claws in a closed room. But by the end of the eighteenth century by Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise at Voyages of De Saussure, the Alps had appeared, not as hellish place and Teratology, but miraculously survived as an Eden in the heart of Europe. Here is a description of Chamonix signed by the proponent of the first ascent of Mont Blanc:
The pure, fresh air that you breathe, so different from the air stuffy and the valleys of Sallanche Servoz, fine crops of the valley, the graceful Townships that meet at every step, giving good weather in the idea of \u200b\u200ba new world, a kind of earthly paradise, encased by a benevolent deity in the circle of mountains. By a curious coincidence the chronological story of Rousseau, who became the spokesman in Europe the fashion of the high mountains, was put on sale in Paris in 1761, the same year in which Saussure performed one of his first trip to Chamonix . On that occasion the Geneva naturalist did post up all the parishes in the valley in which a contract promising a reward to those who had discovered a route to reach the highest peak of the mountain. The race had begun to Mont Blanc. In the Critique
Judgement, published in 1790, four years after the first ascent to the highest peak of Europe, Kant denounces the limits of the empiricist conception of delightful horror of Burke, who in 1757 in his highly successful Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful pointed out the inadequacy of traditional aesthetic categories, raising the sublime. And it cites its mountains and glaciers, which were impressing Europe. For the German philosopher is not the sublime object, but the person who contemplates it.
Who would like to call sublime mountain mass information, provided on one another in a wild disorder, with their pyramids of ice, or the dark and stormy sea, and other such things? The reaction to the degradation of the landscape more economically advanced areas of Europe come together with the cultural change that clears the wilderness. Within a few decades, the Alps become a new and fascinating field of play, "The Playground of Europe" will define the Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, lecturer at Cambridge and mountaineer peak of the Victorian era, as well as odiosamato father of Virginia Woolf. The 1865 is the year of the conquest of the Matterhorn and Alice in Wonderland: for rock climbers, who saw unfolding a wonderful new land of adventure, a coincidence anything but random.
For the Alpine valleys opens the grandest anthropological transformation of their history. Not without a contradiction very typical of modern society, the quest for solitude and pristine environments will trigger a process that will be severely undermined the integrity of those same environments. So much so that, not only in the mountains, you will need to run for cover by establishing protected areas. There is a remarkable coincidence between the way in which Ruskin called the mountains - "the cathedrals of the earth", of which the climbers would be profane - and the definition that in 1896 Charles Eliot will reserve landscape, "the cathedrals of the modern world. "
The appreciation of the 'toothed, shiny peaks "has taken to keep with the success of new scenery calling to European culture. This is what Paul Hazard called it "the invasion des littératures du Nord." After the locus amoenus of the valley of Tempe, after the picturesque Mediterranean classic, it's the turn of the desolate landscapes of the Songs of Ossian, the primitive forests of the bards, the Highlands of the ballads of Robert Burns. Just think of the horror that emerges from the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich: his twisted trees from winter frost, the livid sea, the mists, that new sense of loneliness. The German painter painted
a true framework polar held at Hamburg, Das 'Eismeer' viewing, also titled The Wreck of the Hope. The intent was to represent the new political climate of frost, especially the betrayal of the hopes of the peoples who had formed the Restoration in ice vices of absolutism. But we know that the painting was inspired by polar expeditions, in particular the diary written in 1819-20 by the famous explorer William Parry on one of his missions in search of the Northwest Passage.
In Italian culture trips to the North until the fourteenth century are registered with the brothers Zeno, as I documented in my book The Sphinx of the ice. But until the eighteenth century to establish itself was a curiosity Wunderkammer, perfectly exemplified by Francesco Negri, who between 1663 and 1666 reached the North Cape in winter. On his trip north dominated by a taste of that wonderful new scientific spirit prevails often raised in the school of Galileo, who professes Negri.
The first modern performance of the Nordic world owes to the aesthetics of the sublime is furnished by Vittorio Alfieri in the pages of Life, dedicated to Sweden and Finland crossing. The imposing landscapes and lifeless, the icy wastelands and desert are the perfect stage for a titanic and I aristocrat who, in his anti-social instinct, it is moved by an impulse that can not find peace. The images of the landscape that provides us go Alfieri all in the sense of taste again: after the "ferocious winter," the "raw majestic nature," things "roughly carved," the writer describes the "dark Selvone" and "tart lagoons," where one runs 'fury' in his sleigh rides. Later speaks of "dense hardpan," and "floating planks," etc.. Note the research studied a sharp tongue, foreign to the dignity of Italian tradition.
In the description of the crossing of the Gulf of Bothnia is still partially frozen outlines another component than in the sublime landscape: the players. Alfieri, wielding the ax, fights with the ice floes adrift, personifies a new heroic figure struggling against the elements, which will take off over the next century. From our point of view we just emblematic of the mountaineer and polar explorer.
More than once my sailors, and even myself off the boat over those boulders, and the darker you were starting out, and detaching from the walls of the wood, so that gave rise to the oars and bow. In the years between the eighteenth and nineteenth century take the path of two other North Italian travelers: Giuseppe Acerbi, Carlo Vidua. They both grew up in allegiance to classical culture, which would have made even Acerbi auctioneer conducting 'the Italian Library. " But in both the interest in both the northern destinations unknown, alien to the tradition of Grand Tour, is the attention shown to the Nordic landscapes show how to go and spread the new aesthetic sensibility. He writes Acerbi crossing the Alps to come down to Scandinavian coasts of the Atlantic:
crossing the highest summits of the Alps and they walked several times his head in the clouds and feet in the snow. We spent a piciol between high waterfall between rocks where the snow was still high and caves formed by heat de faces deep and very deep. We walked in all these rooms and it was for us the most wonderful surprise to see us delivered in un palazzo di ghiaccio e di neve ornato di stalactidi grondanti in mille forme ed inesprimibili dall’arte e dal penello. Perché le prue delle navi siano volte decisamente verso i 90° di latitudine nord occorrerà che il nuovo interesse verso gli spazi selvaggi si incontri con lo spirito scientifico promosso dalla cultura del positivismo. Ma nell’età aurea dei viaggi polari, che prende il via a partire dalla fine del XIX secolo, contemporaneamente ai primi tentativi sugli ottomila himalayani, entra in gioco anche un’altra componente. Le immagini delle regioni artiche, come quella dei giganti asiatici, si plasmano sui valori della conquista, della scoperta, della domesticazione della natura, che sono promosse dalle classi dirigenti dell’età coloniale, in un intreccio di dominio di sé e dominio della natura ben attestati, ad esempio, nell’Inghilterra vittoriana.
Non è davvero un caso che la più alta montagna della terra, quella che era chiamata dai tibetani Chomolungma («L’altissima dea») e dai nepalesi Sagarmatha («Dea madre del mondo»), sia stata intitolata a Sir Gorge Everest, il cartografo inglese per molti anni ai vertici del Survey of India, il servizio topografico britannico che rappresentò uno dei pilastri dell’impero di Sua Maestà. Il tetto del mondo parlava inglese e celebrava l’opera benemerita di un solerte geografo dell’impero, che si era speso in the domains of Asia, removing them from the savagery of the indeterminate and delivering them to the civilization of the rulers in the code.
A wave on Everest could not have been that the Union Jack. The link between the most powerful and highest peak was almost fatal. No other Himalayan peak was subjected to a similar fury as part of a European nation. The Times gave the first news of the victory on the morning of June 2, 1953, the same day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Dall'austerity back to the nation after the war the two events seemed to herald a new age of optimism.
"Fighting, search, find, and not to surrender." Il verso dell’Ulisse di Tennyson sulla croce di legno piantata a Capo Evans, in Antartide, in memoria dei cinque componenti della sfortunata spedizione britannica guidata da Scott, testimonia l’analogo spirito con cui vennero condotte le esplorazioni polari. Scott e Shackleton furono sentiti come gli emblemi della tenacia e del coraggio del popolo inglese gettato in terre ignote ai quattro angoli del globo. Per una singolare coincidenza tre mesi dopo il fallimento di Scott, con il Titanic affondava nelle acque dell’Oceano Atlantico un altro orgoglioso mito della potenza inglese.
Anche l’Italia partecipò in prima persona alla corsa verso i poli e nel 1899-1900 le pattuglie del comandante Cagni segnarono un record di penetrazione North Pole, passing the latitude previously established by Nansen. Led by the Duke of Abruzzi, the shipment of the Polar Star was no less full of ideological values. In the young nation torn by economic crisis and social conflict, sought to promote a sense of belonging and pride of country, reinforcing the image of the monarchy undermined by unwise foreign policy. He writes the Duke himself:
Like the men, who struggles daily with overcoming the difficulties, they feel stronger to deal with major, so it is of Nations, that the success reported by their children should feel more encouraged and pressures to continue their efforts to their own greatness and prosperity. still in the early twentieth century Arctic and Antarctica remained shrouded in mystery. In this sense we can say that the poles represent once more the typical myths of modernity. Not only because it was achieved only in the twentieth century, one in 1912 and another in 1926, when every other place on earth had been trodden by man. But also because, above the North Pole could be achieved through the use of modern methods, which allowed it to continue beyond the ice floe where for centuries they had arrested the ships to sail: airships, aircraft, icebreakers. The most striking example is Polar expeditions offered by Umberto Nobile with its airships, including even the great epic rescue operation linked the Red Tent, the largest so far being implemented, with the participation of 6 countries, which fielded 22 planes , 18 ships and over 1500 men.
The discovery of wild nature, which originally had been a reaction to the environmental degradation caused by modern life, has therefore been carried out due to technological developments, that modernity is one of the more significant results. The last frontiers of the wild, the two poles and fourteen eight thousand Himalayan, centuries later, between 1912 and 1964, would in fact fallen one after another within a half-century.
the end of a cycle, but have a passion for nature had become a concern to the destruction that was becoming ever more indiscriminate. Perhaps, as Schiller said, compared to the ancient natural feelings, we feel modern nature because we feel the threat hanging over it. And perhaps there is the veneration inspired by his vision also alludes to something valuable to share our feelings of that nature, to which modernity has deprived us. We realize that every time a mountain, close to home or end of the world, helps us to win at least one condition at the moment of separation.
