Mountains, meaning, mediation: Petrarch’s ‘Ascent to Mont Ventoux’ (1336) and the ecological imagination of classical Chinese poetry

Abstract

<p>Petrarch’s ascent of the highest mountain in Provence on April 26, 1336 CE, has been interpreted as a turning point in European environmental philosophy. For Petrarch, the allure of mountains to the human mind is a dangerous seduction as it brings him away from God, inviting a curiosity in the material world and in the self as a material object immersed in that world. In China, it was the Six Dynasties period (222–589 CE) that inaugurated a new aesthetic mode of interacting with mountain environments. Through a comparative reading, this essay suggests that the representation of phenomenological encounters with mountains in the Chinese poetic tradition offers a powerful contrastive paradigm to the Petrarchan model of eco-mimesis. These mountain-moments represent textual, highly crafted acts, a scripted re-performance of an encounter with physical nature, but they do so according to each culture’s specific understanding of the proper relation between the mind and more-than-human world.</p>