High Places
Height matters. We don’t have to be in Steamboat Springs at eight thousand feet, either suffering from oxygen deprivation or enjoying a Rocky Mountain high, to be aware of the local altitude. Granted, we cannot distinguish between degrees of elevation the way we can nuances of color, but our standard equipment does include basic calibration. We conserve kinetic energy, subconsciously remembering that what goes up must come down. We know we are on a height as much by recalling the climb as by looking at the view. At least in relative terms, we know where we stand.
Blessed as we are with the gift of imagination, and sometimes acute memory retention, no height scaling experience is done vapidly. Oh, no. Leaning out over the edge of the Empire State Building clutching our cellphone cameras, or descending the Mount Washington on old brakes and tires, makes us feel alive in ways that plain living on the plain cannot top. Whether we go queezy or simply tighten every muscle, a visceral response is only the primate thing to do. The higher we get, the more we calculate the risks of every little misstep. This is no cowardly climb-down, as the Brits so cutely put it, this is just plain common sense.
We climb so that we may see, knowing as axiomatic that the higher we climb, the further the view. For some that process of unfolding, in the climb and then in the contemplation, is as profound as life gets. I suspect that such emotions were profound enough in millennia past for all manner of allusions to altitude to become embedded deeply within our cultural roots and our language.
Perhaps altitude attitude all goes back to the most primitive forms of religion. Our unknown valley-dwelling ancestors looked to the skies for the basic necessities of sun and rain; and marveled at the nocturnal mysteries of the moon and stars, of all realms the most inaccessible and inexplicable. Somehow, over the eons, bending their chins skyward inculcated in them a sense of divinity in absolute altitude: the Most High. I suspect that from such a widespread response to the physical organization of a world perceived as flat, a kind of baseline above which extended vast heavens, height took on layers of meaning at first religious and later more broadly cultural. Societies did not need to build pyramids and ziggurats to direct religious awe at the heavens. Perhaps long before people felt comfortable climbing them, many societies held mountains to be sacred, like Mount Olympus of the Greeks, Mount Tmolus of the Lydians at Sardis, or Mount Tai in early dynastic China.
There are more citadels than sacred mountains. Rarely do they coincide. Mostly the fortified heights include places of worship directed at even loftier heights elsewhere that were both too revered and too inaccessible. The citadel itself was a place for regular worship and ritual, and occasional crisis management. The Acropolis in Athens and Mont-Saint-Michel may be the quintessential examples of habitable heights as places accorded lofty status without being themselves divine. But the cathedral towns on hills—Durham, Orvieto, and Vezelay—are the exception, and even there fortification preceded veneration. For most low-lying cities, the ideal compromise site for the cathedral was the local hill or mound but usually such sites were unavailable.
As for places, so, too for people. Once upon a time, for winning in war and for keeping the peace, taller was more “respectable”. Certainly, taller was stronger. The “high and mighty” were to be feared, if not respected. Perhaps in most societies, people have always accorded tall people a sense of superiority, deserved or not, and I suspect that we have been wired for it since our primitive primate days. In elevated language, the wiring reveals itself. A hill could be called an eminence, as a person could be called eminent. In ordinary usage, the wiring reveals itself even more. For example, we still talk of looking up to people who are in a sense “elevated” by virtue, of respecting what is on the up and up, of looking down on people with gigantic failings, and of lifting the spirits of those who have an inferiority complex. We have high hopes and hold the highest regard for those who are high-class or take the high road or occupy the moral high ground or risk high stakes in a high-minded cause. Social climbers make the upward mobility all too obvious. Class means high-class, high-brow, living the high life, if not exactly sitting at high table. We greatly value what we value highly. I am not a musician, but people like me imagine musical high notes as hovering over the low ones as if in three dimensional space, and understand that in some sense higher is better here too.
Small wonder then that there are more sacred mountains than sacred valleys. If we rhapsodize over the view of lofty heights, or the view from sublime heights, this should still strike us as manifestly unfair. If we would love our immediate world, there are lots of common-sense reasons to worship valleys and rivers more than mountains. Perhaps the peoples of Papua New Guinea and the upper Amazon are more balanced in their focus than are the descendants of the oldest “civilizations”. Ever since Eden, we tend to sully the paradise of valleys we would inhabit. In nineteenth century America the closest valleys came to being held sacred was in their artistic worship by Hudson River School landscape painters and romantic poets as vales, intervales, and dells. And then Grand Canyon and Yellowstone and Yosemite trumped all. At last America had valleys worthy of being held sacred, which in our secular culture means being declared National Parks. If the fate of valleys became a bit less unfair, still it is the mountains that rule. The void of one would not exist but for the solid of the other. Were it not for El Capitan and the other peaks, there would be no Yosemite Valley; even Grand Canyon has its sacred San Francisco mountains.
Most profoundly for us today, the sense of the sacred on high remains embedded in the imagery of our secular patrimony. Consider that the idealized image of the New England community is usually expressed not as a village nestling in a valley but as a city on a hill. Many of New England’s most photographed villages are hilltowns like Litchfield, Petersham, and Craftsbury Common. These are inspiration enough for a nation, but they are merely the literal embodiment of something much more profound than photogenic form, and that is the underlying meaning, the metaphor of the ideal on high.
Even as his good ship Arbella had yet to anchor off these shores, John Winthrop launched the language that would in centuries to come stand as the metaphor for the unfolding American ideal: for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us. As luck would have it, the site Winthrop finally settled on for the seedling city of Boston boasted not one, but three hills, the middle one itself a “Trimountain,” whose highest ground soon sprouted a beacon, so utilitarian a use for height, and so apt a metaphor for what Boston would become.
Boston’s leading lights in the generation of Sam Adams would launch a revolution armed first and foremost with rhetoric of fair representation, liberty, and independence. Once that revolution bore the fruit of idealized government, the founding fathers faced the task of housing that government in a suitable setting. Consider the idealism that guided them still. When the Massachusetts state government outgrew its old digs in the heart of Boston, and years of indecision over a proper new site turned to impatience, there could have been no more fitting site for the New State House than dome-like Beacon Hill, John Hancock’s old pasture, now suddenly available. It was the perfect marriage of building to site. Eight years before the site became available, Boston-bred architect Charles Bulfinch had thought to crown his proposed design for the state house, presented to now-Governor Sam Adams, with a dome. Once the dome-like form of the topmost fifty-plus feet of gravelly hill behind the building was carted into Back Bay, the New State House dome crowned what was left. Within, representatives met in a radially organized space echoing the dome without. All in all, it was a flourish worthy of the occasion.
Modest Mr. Bulfinch pioneered an architectural form of such enduring aptness that he was asked to design the U.S. Capitol, as well as the capitol in Augusta, Maine. Launched on Beacon Hill, the Bulfinch form of dome on pediment on hill would inspire, by way of Capitol Hill itself, half of our state capitols. In Bulfinch’s design and all its successors, Winthrop’s grand idea became visible for all the people. Government was no longer the citadel arrogantly rebuffing popular scrutiny, but the shrine serving to inspire with exemplary conduct. A tall order to aspire to, indeed. What free nation before had seated government on hilltops?
The overarching metaphor of a City on a Hill, a Beacon calling forth the better angels of our nature, was heady stuff for a city given to restraint, understatement and smugness; by the nineteenth century, Boston’s moral high ground soon commanded so vast a dominion that Oliver Wendell Holmes was to dub it the Hub of the Universe. By the twentieth the message was deeply embedded in the national psyche, even if the source was dimly remembered.
Lest there be any doubt of this, two presidents with a gift of the gab let the beacon shine for them. In January 1961 President-elect JFK addressed the legislature on Beacon Hill in words so eloquent they are a joy to read:
"I speak neither from false provincial pride nor artful political flattery. For no man about to enter high office in this country can ever be unmindful of the contribution this state has made to our national greatness.
"Its leaders have shaped our destiny long before the great republic was born. Its principles have guided our footsteps in times of crisis as well as in times of calm. Its democratic institutions--including this historic body--have served as beacon lights for other nations as well as our sister states.
"For what Pericles said to the Athenians has long been true of this commonwealth: 'We do not imitate--for we are a model to others.'
"And so it is that I carry with me from this state to that high and lonely office to which I now succeed more than fond memories of firm friendships. The enduring qualities of Massachusetts--the common threads woven by the Pilgrim and the Puritan, the fisherman and the farmer, the Yankee and the immigrant--will not be and could not be forgotten in this nation's executive mansion…
"But I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier.
"'We must always consider,' he said, 'that we shall be as a city upon a hill--the eyes of all people are upon us.'
"Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us--and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill--constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within.
"History will not judge our endeavors--and a government cannot be selected--merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these.
"For of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us--recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state--our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions:
"First, were we truly men of courage--with the courage to stand up to one's enemies--and the courage to stand up, when necessary, to one's associates--the courage to resist public pressure, as well as private greed?
"Secondly, were we truly men of judgment--with perceptive judgment of the future as well as the past--of our own mistakes as well as the mistakes of others--with enough wisdom to know that we did not know, and enough candor to admit it?
"Third, were we truly men of integrity--men who never ran out on either the principles in which they believed or the people who believed in them--men who believed in us--men whom neither financial gain nor political ambition could ever divert from the fulfillment of our sacred trust?
"Finally, were we truly men of dedication--with an honor mortgaged to no single individual or group, and compromised by no private obligation or aim, but devoted solely to serving the public good and the national interest.
"Courage--judgment--integrity--dedication--these are the historic qualities of the Bay Colony and the Bay State--the qualities which this state has consistently sent to this chamber on Beacon Hill here in Boston and to Capitol Hill back in Washington.
"And these are the qualities which, with God's help, this son of Massachusetts hopes will characterize our government's conduct in the four stormy years that lie ahead."
President Ronald Reagan embarked on his administration referring to that same city on a hill, and unlike JFK lived to give a Farewell Speech, where the image appears again, by now a metaphor for America. Penned by Peggy Noonan, the speech is worth quoting at length:
"I've been reflecting on what the past 8 years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one--a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, `Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.' …
"…I've thought a bit of the `shining city upon a hill.' The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
"And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was 8 years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home."
More than any other leader in recent memory, Kennedy and Reagan made Winthrop’s rhetoric our own, and with it did much good, at home and abroad.
Bostonians did not vote for Reagan as they did for JFK, but Reagan voted for Boston. Here was another reason for Bostonians to feel smug in the ideal if wary of the reality; lofty buildings in high places do not always inspire lofty rhetoric, and lofty rhetoric in high places does not always inspire confidence. But we sure miss it when our leaders stumble over their first language, let alone fail to invoke a dream, much less make strides toward it. And if Beacon Hill has had its ups and downs, at times itself transformed into Mount Gridlock, and if Capitol Hills in Washington and beyond at times lose sight of the beacon, ours is still a system as stern as Winthrop and as optimistic as JFK and Reagan, and that is reason enough to keep aiming higher. Height will always matter.
© 2023 Thomas M. Paine
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