The Weight of Altitude

In the high, thin air of the mountains, the body begins to negotiate with the silence. It is a strange, vertical sort of quiet that seems to press against the eardrums, demanding a slower rhythm of breath. We spend our lives on the plains, accustomed to the horizontal drift of days, where the horizon is a flat promise we can walk toward indefinitely. But at the summit, the world loses its patience with our small, terrestrial concerns. The stone and the ice do not care for our schedules or our heavy coats. They have been standing in the same place for eons, watching the clouds perform their slow, indifferent theater. There is a profound humility in realizing that we are merely passing through a landscape that does not require our presence to exist. We are guests in a cathedral of granite, shivering in the shadow of things that were old before we learned to name them. If we were to leave our footprints behind, would the mountain even notice the change in its skin?

Arnab Pal has captured this sense of scale in his work titled Jungfrau. It reminds me that we are only ever visitors in the places that take our breath away. Does the mountain feel lighter when we finally descend?