Essays

Vincent Callebaut: “The Ideal City Doesn’t Exist”

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The following interview with Belgian eco-architect Vincent Callebaut, whose green buildings strive to reconcile nature and the urban world, was first published in French in December 2020 on the Fondation Bouygues Immobilier blog Demain la Ville. Translation by James Horrox.

What exactly is the “ideal city”?

The scheme of the ideal city is somewhat of a twentieth century idea. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generations dreamed of having a detached family house with a private garden outside the city — a city that had itself been imagined by modernists, notably Le Corbusier, as a living organism where each district represented an organ. This vision leads to the hyper-energy-intensive cities we knew at the end of the twentieth century. That is, cities designed in a mono-functional way: a business district in La Défense, a museumified city centre, bourgeois neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods for immigrants, residential housing in the suburbs…

This pattern made possible the explosion of automobile dependence and urban sprawl. A city that expends huge amounts of energy on heating, lighting and moving its citizens.

Where are we today? Climate change and the pandemic have renewed many debates surrounding urban models

For the past fifteen years, we’ve seen in Southeast Asia a phenomenon of de-densification of metropolises in favour of the countryside. Having built megacities of tens of millions of inhabitants like in Shanghai, they decided they could rebuild villages that are self-sufficient in energy and food, and hyper-connected to allow for continued teleworking. This is part of the famous ‘third industrial revolution’ theorised by Jeremy Rifkin — the addition of renewable energies and information and communication technologies (ICT).

Finally, this question of the ideal city is somewhat caught in a vice. As an architect, you have to respond to this contemporary schizophrenia: everyone wants to live as close to nature as possible while at the same time being hyper-connected. Today’s dilemma is how to join these two extremes together into a habitat. With the pandemic, this phenomenon has become more pronounced. This calls into question the pattern that we’ve been working with for years — the idea, repeated to us on loop by the media, that 75% of the world’s population will live in cities in 2050. If we manage to live happily in the countryside, there will surely be an inflection of this trajectory.

What is your approach?

The priority is to avoid horizontal urban sprawl, to safeguard the land and protect the soil from artificialisation. I’m one of a new generation of architects attempting to respond to these issues by condensing space. We work a lot on the serene densification of city centres, the revitalisation of rural and intermediate fabrics. The idea is to bring housing closer to the workplace and services so as to restore quality of life. It’s a bit like the concept of the fifteen-minute city.

Our proposal is to create vertical villages in the city. It’s a question of creating towers, not as in the last century, but with vertical or oblique interior streets that lead to different services — swimming pools, shared vegetable gardens, work spaces, party rooms or whatever it might be… We try not to put the core containing the stairwells, elevators and landings in the middle of the board, in the dark, but rather to outsource it, so from the elevator we see the city unfold. Rather like the escalators of the Centre Pompidou. We want to make people want to stroll vertically, so the most beautiful places in the building are open to all — including non-residents.

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Is this part of your proposals for the Paris 2050 call for projects commissioned by the city of Paris?

Yes. We thought about how a city like Paris could densify itself, taking into account its magnificent heritage, and about how to implement a circular and virtuous economy in a European capital. We developed the concept of energy solidarity, which consists of a strong dialogue between contemporary architectures and heritage. Haussmannian buildings like those bordering three kilometres of the Rue de Rivoli can’t be insulated from the outside — they will remain thermal sieves — so we imagined contemporary grafts on the rooftops of Paris. These extensions produce the energy (electricity, heat) that historic buildings need. It’s a way of adapting a building so that it consumes less energy while preserving the land outside the city.

Whether in Cairo, Paris or Taipei, your projects have a strong, somewhat futuristic identity. Don’t they reproduce a kind of idealised city themselves?

We are part of a trend of “contextualist” architects. That is, when we develop a project, we imagine it for a specific site, a specific climate, a type of user and specific needs. You can’t transplant a project from one country to another, or from the countryside to the city, since each project is conceived according to the genius loci, the genius of the place. Each project is a different challenge, whose goal is to reinforce the identity that existed before — which was not the modernists’ approach to the ideal city. Our projects try to meet the needs of residents and the challenges of tomorrow’s city regarding density, green spaces, services and so on.

Aren’t they too focused on, for example, disruptive technologies?

In France we like to oppose contrasts: on the one hand, high tech, based on emerging technologies, and on the other, low tech, which relies on frugality and a reduction of needs. Whenever you embark on an architectural project, you start by analysing the local climate, such as the sun and the prevailing winds, to make sure you create buildings that are as compact as possible, and which reduce their needs to a minimum.

We are working on the inertia of buildings, with thick facades, exterior mantles, bio-based insulation in natural fibre that allows them to have a very low energy bill. In Cairo, the Gate Heliopolis project uses techniques that are 3000 years old, found in the temples of the pharaohs. The outside air (which sometimes reaches 40 degrees) is naturally sucked in by wind chimneys and passes under the foundations of the building, where it is cooled by the cooler ground before being pushed into the building. This is how a termite mound functions. We call it biomimicry.

After implementing this low-tech simplicity, we integrate technologies and renewable energies that have proven their worth. These technologies allow each building to produce its own energy, and in a decentralised fashion. It’s a complementary offering to nuclear power in France. In a way, we’re taking the best of high tech and the best of low tech.

Any final thoughts?

To conclude, I think there is no ideal city. It doesn’t exist. If the great dilemma of our times is how to create a habitat that is both connected and close to nature, I think that medium-sized cities can do well. By definition, they offer a quality of life on a human scale, which is simpler than in the city since they already have both services and nature.

Ever Building, Ever Falling

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by The Editors

It’s not unreasonable to assume, as many do, that the halls of academia are the natural home of the essay as a literary medium. But that’s not entirely true. Certainly many academics are prolific essayists, their extramural output consumed by a broad and diverse readership beyond the narrow audience of peers upon whose approval their employment depends. But the scholarly journals in which these people’s careers are made are rarely amenable to publishing work that strays beyond a strict set of fixed requirements – regarding style, structure, content, and so on. Despite the historical centrality of the essay in the development of modern academia, there is, paradoxically, woven into the fabric of the academy, a distinct aversion to the essay as a literary form. Indeed, its elasticity as a medium – and arguably also its intrinsic modesty (essayer: ‘to attempt’, or ‘try out’) – could even be said to place it inherently at odds with the world of the professional scholar, with whose role comes the expectation that they should be dealing in conclusions, authoritative statements of truth, rather than mere ‘attempts’.
    The dominant mindset in the social sciences insists that the production of such statements demands a particular way of thinking. From Day 1, students are cajoled into adopting a scientific, almost legalistic approach based on a positivistic, conceptual, structured mode of thought concerned with objectivity, definition and order, and which proceeds through the development of an argument. “Make your case” is the foundational mantra in a process of instruction that teaches us to organise and articulate our thoughts as if addressing a courtroom. Any proposition brought to our readers’ attention must be supported by evidence and authority, assessed by reference to the established, the new judged against the yardstick of the old. Once thusly judged and found to be sufficiently deferential to all that has gone before, it may be assimilated into the canon, added to the reports of cases argued and determined in the court of peer review as the judgment of a court is integrated into a body of common law. And so the cycle continues, until the substance at the core of a discipline is that which has been most thoroughly and comprehensively drained of its juices: literally, ‘disciplined’.
    A way of thinking that discards and disparages anything not strictly relevant to the judicial function demands a corresponding mode of expression, a way of writing in which words are corralled into singularity of meaning, denuded of their generativity, stripped of their imaginal potential and their power to move the reader and to stir feeling, memory and emotion.
    For those disciplines whose very purpose is to try to understand the workings of human society, this presents something of a contradiction. On the one hand, social scientists are always ready to trot out the familiar axiom that the social world is a living ‘object’ – fluid, dynamic, multifaceted and in constant mutation – and that it is therefore wrong to approach it as a dispassionate observer looking at a static or completed entity. And yet on the other hand, a residual fixation on scientific rigour more often than not leads these very same people to do exactly that, falling back into a mechanical way of thinking and writing about their subject deliberately designed to separate out individual pieces of the world and systematically drain them of their colour, richness and ambiguity: a mode of critique fundamentally rooted in the urge to separate.
    Think about how much of the language around the scientific method, with its obsession with categorising and distinguishing, is based on the metaphor of cutting: a scholar is said to possess a sharp mind. We cut through a mass of evidence. An analysis is incisive. Definitions foster precision. And so on and so forth. Everything is based on separation (all rooted in the fundamental separation of subjective and objective, observer and observed), the implicit assumption being that the best way to understand the world around us is by separating out its constituent parts. A mechanical conception of reality then, mirrored by a mechanical thought process, and in turn, mechanical ways of expressing it.

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Henry David Thoreau once said that no definition of poetry is sufficient unless it is itself poetry. What he meant was that nothing can be grasped in its quality of ‘being alive’ without adopting an intellectual posture in harmony with the object of study: a complicity or intimacy between the observer and the phenomenon being observed. As Michel Maffesoli remarked in an essay published on this site a few years ago, the positivist rejection of anything incompatible with what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “a priori of objectifying distance” leads to a refusal of such intimacy, instead opting for an approach that attempts to understand phenomena by submitting them a priori to abstract and instrumental reason and thus forcing them to conform in one way or another to the prejudices of the observer.
    This mode of inquiry is underpinned by what C.G. Jung referred to as ‘directed thought’: a quasi-legalistic process whereby thoughts are ‘directed’ through purely rational and conceptual frameworks. Against directed thinking, Jung juxtaposed ‘non-directed’ or ‘archaic’ thinking. Where the former “produces innovations and adaptations, copies reality, and tries to act upon it”, the latter “sets free subjective tendencies”. Whereas directed thought “operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting”, archaic thought is “effortless, working spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives.” Where directed thought tends to be slow, lumbering and unwieldy, archaic thinking is associative: image piles upon image, feeling upon feeling; ideas swell and undulate of their own motion. What is valued is the free flow of the process, and the sense of immersion in a drama not entirely of one’s own making. It is this kind of thinking, Jung argues, that provides “the means to releasing creative forces and contents”.
    Unlike what we ordinarily call thinking, which, as Robert Sardello puts it, is “not thinking at all, but rather the stringing together of already completed thoughts”, Jung’s ‘archaic thought’ occurs through us. We might connect it to a particular Ancient deity, known to the Romans as Mercury, and to the Greeks as Hermes: god of the imagination, Hermes crosses boundaries, making connections which cast new light on both sides, sometimes in unexpected and fruitful ways. Indeed, whereas directed thought only engages with the world that we think, which is at the best of times only incidentally concerned with the world that we imagine and experience, imagination as directed by Hermes allows for a particular receptivity to chance finds made along the road that may ultimately feed into a deeper understanding of our subject.
    From the point of view of Hermes, a form of interpretation and expression which fails to evoke the imagination or convey the reader into different states of being, instead merely restating what has already been written somewhere else in slightly different terms, is a low-grade one. Hermes, by contrast, as the messenger of the gods, patron of “rule breakers, border crossers, and go-betweens”, is able to make connections between phenomena and their archetypal roots.

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The pliability of the essay as a literary medium makes it ideally suited to this endeavour, allowing for an internal logic and structure mirroring such a movement of thought and enabling the free play of devices typically spurned by academia as anathema to the objectifying distance traditionally upheld as the criterion of academic integrity: subjectivity, imagery, metaphor, and so on – devices that may not be conducive to “precision” or “incisiveness” in any formal sense, but which can nonetheless invoke a great deal of content in very few words. Feelings, atmospheres and emotions cannot be described in the colourless and undelightful prose of academia, but these are the very things that lie at the heart of the human experience. In contrast to all those ‘cutting’ words, proper to a science which seeks first and foremost to separate, cut, divide and define, poetic forms of expression, freeing the reader to think in images that foster an intimacy with the phenomenon being described, have a ‘reconnecting’ function. Communicating through rhythm, sound and emotion as well as by intellect, a poetic phrase or image conveys a kind of synaesthesia whereby multiple senses are brought into play all at once, and entire worlds conjured up in a few strokes.
    For someone trained in academic writing, this can be an incredibly difficult mode of expression to get comfortable with. Indeed, uneasiness with this refusal of distance no doubt goes some way towards explaining why many academics resist the pull of the personal essay so forcefully. But it might equally be argued that it is precisely this very quality that makes the essay a mode of expression so well suited to the development of new ideas: breathing space for the articulation of a thought process paralleling that of its object; a supple impressionism that does not shy away from repetition – indeed, openly embraces it – each iteration like a brush-stroke contributing in its own way to the gradual perfection of the picture.
    When Secessio came into being a little over a decade ago, it aspired to be a meeting place for these kinds of explorations: a collection of “attempts”, overlapping, complementary, mutually reinforcing, bleeding into one another, each emerging theme given new richness, a new layer, another nuance or a subtle difference in shade with each new brush stroke. Navigating the chaos that surrounds us, however we go about it, is, after all, a creative process: the unending endeavour to build (poiesis: ‘to create’) an understanding of the world. We are indeed, all of us, every day, moving through a reality that is fluid, ever evolving, and in constant mutation; a world which, as Sardello puts it, is “an ongoing creative action of soul, taking place rhythmically, in time with the rhythmic activity of heart that creates our bodies.” In his poem “Milton”, William Blake speaks of the “golden builders” of imagination who will never finish their work on “Golgonooza, the spiritual Four-fold London eternal, // In immense labours & sorrows, ever building, ever falling”. In “Jerusalem” he describes the work as “continually building & continually decaying desolate”. With these lines in mind, Kathleen Raine writes of “the archetype of the ever-present, never-realized pattern of the sancta civitas, the pattern of the ‘golden builders’ be they architects or poets, painters or musicians”. In this sense, the final cause of building – Aristotle’s “that-for-the-sake-of-which” what we are contributing to is constructed – is not so much the functional use of the end product, as interiority: life, in other words, as an endless series of attempts.

Don’t Look Left

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Pavey Ark

From down in the valley, Pavey Ark doesn’t have an immediately obvious role in the drama of Langdale’s towering battlements. In the jagged arrangement of peaks and crags cutting out into the mist, it sits back, a sullen wall of black stone sunk obliquely into the mountainside high above the dale. From below, it’s more a presence than a peak, standing over its neighbourhood with a quietly threatening demeanour of dignity and calm. Up close, when it slides into view over the crest of the hike from the valley floor, its effect is breathtaking.
   A quarter of a mile across and some seven hundred feet in height, the face of the precipice rising from the north shore of Stickle Tarn forms the back wall of an immense natural amphitheatre. Lodged in the slopes of Harrison Stickle to the west and tapering down to nothing at its eastern shoulder, it appears on first sight as a giant, stegosaurid ridge, slashed top to bottom with deep, yawning gullies and embroidered with grassy terraces and vegetation, its rocky spine saw-toothed against the sky and massive, cracked black slabs hanging still and silent over the lake. So flawless is the configuration of mountain, tarn and crag that it’s almost as though the whole arrangement has emerged from the imagination of a Romantic painter – an impression somehow reinforced by the stone barrage that dams the southern shore of the tarn, doubling as a viewing platform from which to take in the grandeur of the composition.
   This masterpiece of geology was a playground for the pioneers of British alpinism who flocked to the north of England in the late 19th century. Walter Parry Haskett Smith, the ‘father of rock climbing’, visited in 1882 on one of his first trips to the Lakes; Owen Glynne Jones, Cecil Slingsby, Norman Collie, Aleister Crowley and the Abraham brothers would all put their mark on it, as would more or less every luminary of twentieth century British rock climbing. Successive generations have bequeathed their own legacies to the rock in the invisible lattice of climbing routes that snake around its giant slabs and gullies. The stories they inscribe into its fictive inscape keep the mountain’s past quietly present in the jagged lyricism of the stone: some disingenuously picturesque (Little Gully, Gwynne’s Chimney), others openly malevolent in the chthonian toponymy favoured by the type of people whose accomplishments they weave into the philological contours of the land: Crescent Slabs, Arcturus, Fallen Angel, Cruel Sister, Mother Courage, Rainmaker, Impact Day, and a long list of others that would look as at home on an Iron Maiden setlist as in any climbing logbook.
   For most visitors, the calls of the climbers echoing around the cirque are just one of a million brush strokes that make up the spectacular vista that bursts upon the senses at the end of the climb from the valley floor. But while the poetry of their route names might go unnoticed except by those for whom it provides the reference system of their sport, the name of the mountain itself, of course, rarely does. ‘Ark’ seems like an unusual toponym in these parts, yet even without knowing anything of its provenance it somehow feels strangely appropriate: a vessel of secrets, sacred things, unknowable; ‘arcane’ – as if a statement of the mystery the human animal ascribes to these great natural monuments that have stood in place since the planet was in its fiery infancy.
   For many years the name was thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon hearg, a holy grove or temple (from the Old Norse hörgr, meaning a heathen altar, a place of worship or sanctuary), and the Icelandic paufi – a “lurking fiend” (according to some sources; to others, a “dark and mysterious corner”): “Altar of the Lurking Fiend”. Current consensus puts the etymology of the term ‘Ark’ in the Old Norse element ‘erg’, a relative of the Gaelic airigh, meaning ‘shieling’ or ‘hill-pasture’. The element appears in more subtle forms (-er, -ergh, -argh etc.) in many place names of northern England, as in Mansergh, Cleator and Torver in Cumbria, Grimsargh in Lancashire and Arkengarthdale in Yorkshire. Arklid, at the south end of Coniston Water, is the hlíð (fellside) of the erg. Little Arrow near Coniston, formerly known as Little Ayrey, and Airey Force at Ullswater derive from an alternative form of the word, also found in Orkney, Shetland and the north of Scotland in Askary, Halsary and others. As for ‘Pavey’, ‘Pavia’ is now thought to have been a woman’s name (a 1902 study of the region’s Viking history notes Pavy-fields on the Solway, named after Pavia, the widow of a local landowner named Robert de Grinsdale); so, ‘Pavia’s Shieling’.
   Oddly enough then, the obvious Noachian connotations aren’t actually a million miles from the most probable etymology of the name, suggesting a place of sanctuary. Put it to a vote among anyone who’s ever visited Pavey Ark on a rainy day in winter though, and I’d hope that ‘Altar of the Lurking Fiend’ would be a stronger contender. For while the cavernous topography of this remote corrie tarn no doubt provides shelter from the arctic winds sweeping down over the fells, the primeval giant rising from its northern shore looks anything but beneficent, especially through the murk of the crepuscular months when the mountain’s summit is shrouded in cloud and the specks of primary colour against the gunmetal grey are few and far between.
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While an onward ascent into the eaves of the Langdale Pikes may follow one of several possible routes, for a certain kind of walker, from the moment Pavey Ark presents itself over the crest of the climb from the valley floor, there is really only one.
   From the foot of the East Buttress, Jack’s Rake cuts a sharp diagonal west across the face of the cliff, a jagged scar so geometrically precise as to appear at first sight an act of human vandalism, but which in fact follows a natural fissure slashed into the mountain during its violent birth in the freezers and furnaces of prehistory. Presumably this ledge had been known to shepherds for hundreds of years before the Victorian aristocracy arrived, and before them by the unnamed generations who cut the Neolithic axe heads in Dungeon Ghyll as they scrambled around the precipice in search of sites to quarry their stone. Of these, however, or indeed of Jack himself, no record remains. A footnote to an essay by one A.P. Rossiter in the 1954 Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club mentions a Captain Brown, who apparently tackled the rake sometime in the 1700s, but aside from being noted as “a very bold fellow”, nothing further is ventured as to his identity. It is to one Dr. Richard Pendlebury that the first recorded ascent is generally credited. A legend of British rock-climbing, later to find fame in the climbing world for being one of the party to make the first ascent of the east face of Monte Rosa in Italy, Pendlebury spoke of Jack’s Rake in a casual remark in the visitors’ book at the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel in the 1850s as a “striking yet simple excursion” into the dramatic rock scenery of the Lakeland fells.
   The nonchalance of Pendlebury’s assessment echoes through the accounts left behind by Pavey Ark’s Victorian visitors, perhaps befitting of the footsoldiers in modernity’s battle to assert mankind’s mastery of nature. In an article in the Pall Mall Budget in March 1892, by which time the climbing world had arrived in Langdale, H.A. Gwynne, after whom Gwynne’s Chimney on Pavey Ark is named, thus describes the rake with similar matter-of-factness as “a ledge that looks from below hardly wide enough for a cat to stand upon”, but which in fact “offers no difficulty whatever, unless the climber is given to attacks of giddiness, and if that is the case there will hardly be any need to tell him that he has no business there at all”.
   To climbers, a rake is a functional thing, a conduit to more serious routes higher up the rockface, and which to this end serves a purely utilitarian purpose. But it might well be argued that the insouciance of the climbing fraternity has given this path a much less fearsome reputation than it deserves. Those who arrived in Langdale in the late 1800s, as Haskett Smith records in his Climbing in the British Isles (1894), were in many cases ill-prepared for the reality of Jack’s Rake, and in that respect not a great deal has changed. Today’s guidebooks class the route as a Grade 1 Scramble: a climb, technically, but as Alfred Wainwright puts it, “just about the limit that the ordinary common garden or fell walker[1] reasonably may be expected to attempt”. As with many of the ascents with which it shares this designation, it’s at least in part down to a general misinterpretation of the grading system that the route draws so many visitors, and a growing inventory of tragedy over recent years has fanned the embers of an ongoing debate among the Lakeland cognoscenti over the suitability of the classification.
   Wainwright himself seems to have been of the view, now widely-held and enthusiastically promoted by local Mountain Rescue, that despite its Grade 1 status this is not an ascent to be underestimated. AW of course was hardly a stranger to the ragged escarpments of the Lake District. Striding Edge on Helvellyn, Lord’s Rake on Scafell, and Sharp Edge, the rocky blade slung from the roof of Blencathra in the north, are all described in his books with characteristic warmth and affection, as are plenty of others. But in the case of Jack’s Rake he saw fit to make an exception. “Difficult and awkward” he says, it “climbs high across the face of a fearful precipice”, and he resolves, one senses in the name of a selfless dedication to the furtherance of human knowledge, to describe the path in “a wealth of gruesome detail”. In a later essay he notes the satisfaction to be gained by the humble fell-walker from having completed what is, officially, a rock climb. But “it is the only notch on my belt,” he remarks, “and there will be no more”.
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The hike up to the cliff is a lonely one, but for the odd detachment of politely quizzical Herdwicks entering and issuing from the long grass by the side of the tarn. The sensation of solitude and the sheer enormity of the rock intensify as the path fades away and the springy peat ground of the eastern shore becomes the boggy delta of Bright Beck, and finally a steep scree slope up to the cairn that marks the start of the route. Suddenly the peaceful waters are a long way behind, and up ahead, what had appeared not ten minutes previously as an oblique diagonal reveals itself as a near-vertical ascent.
   The rock is wet with runoff from the summit plateau – and in winter frozen solid – but squeeze into the narrow gully, face pressed up close against the stone, and it’s with surprising ease, though not a scrap of dignity, that one finds oneself lurching suddenly upwards.
   This first section is the steepest and most technically challenging part of the climb, but once attuned to the awkward rhythms of the mountain, the anxiety of fast-increasing altitude quickly dissipates with the realisation that the ribs of stone to the left form a protective balustrade between the climber and the sheer drop to the scree field below. The rock here is dodgy at the best of times, crumbling and eroded by the thousands of hands and boots that have left the polished patches that map the route for those who follow, but the worst that can happen for now is a nasty fall back down the gully. After a tricky bridging move past a narrow chimney, progress can be made with confidence toward a large splinter of fallen rock, known as ‘the Gun’, jutting out into the sky.
   And then the scrambling suddenly becomes more serious. Awkward manoeuvres past the Gun lead straight into a narrow terrace with an unprotected edge above a vertical drop. The sidewall suddenly gone, the path, such as it is, tightens to the point of disappearance, to the left, nothing but air between the climber and the steel grey sheet of Stickle Tarn a sickening distance below.
   ‘Don’t look left’ is frequent advice to first-timers undertaking an ascent of Jack’s Rake, and, dispensed though it often is with a wry smile, it’s not entirely facetious. Fear of falling is a natural fear, a reflex we share with many of our fellow creatures, and one that serves a fairly obvious evolutionary function. This fear, when it takes hold, manifests physically in a number of ways, one of which being an unsettling sensation of involuntary motion that kicks in as the vestibular system grapples to make sense of new, unfamiliar stimuli, adjusting its postural sway to compensate for the sudden instability it senses. The view from any point on Jack’s Rake is breathtaking, but only from a place of safety does distant grandeur make an engaging companion. To focus on far-off things at altitude is to risk losing sight of closer realities: at a certain point, all of a sudden, the priority becomes putting one hand in front of the other and making it off the cliff-face alive.
   The now inevitable onward course of the climb depends entirely on how this visceral rush is channelled. The mechanics of human gyroscopy pay no regard to reason, but there are holds in the rock that offer firm support, and there is no choice but to find them: to edge carefully upwards, rock to rock, hold to hold, with racing heartbeat thumping through the silence. A short climb up Great Gully leads to a series of vertiginous ledges, and onward to gargantuan square-cut blocks and slabs of volcaniclastic rock, dizzyingly exposed, with nothing to the left but a 500-foot drop. But volcanic bombs and andesite lava spatter make for a surface texture rough and coarse enough to give decent handholds if you can keep it together long enough to find them. Leaning in to the right, body pressed up hard against the mountain, a final breathless clamber over the slabs leads, all of a sudden, into the heathery embrace of the summit plateau.
   On a clear day, most of Cumbria lies spread out below in a sprawling, circular tableau. To the north west, across the long slopes of High Raise, undulating moorland punctuated by rocky outcrops and bilberry terraces rises gently towards Thunacar Knott; panoramic views over the Eastern and Southern Fells: Pillar, Gable, the Buttermere fells, and to the north, the Helvellyn ridge, the Rydal fells and old Skiddaw. To the west, the knobbly outcrop of Harrison Stickle, and beyond, Crinkle Crags, Esk Pike, Bowfell and the Scafell Pikes. To the south, the Coniston fells, and in the far distance the sparkling sands of Morecombe bay. Two thousand feet below, the luminescent green of the Langdale valley winds its way elegantly around Lingmoor Fell towards Elterwater and Windermere. Looking out to the east over Sergeant Man to the Fairfield Horseshoe, somewhere beyond, lying low in misty blue across the dappled drumlins of Blea Rigg, the velvet of the Howgills and the western reaches of the Yorkshire Dales. “You could not ask for more” wrote the classicist H.H. Symonds of this magnificent vista. “This is the hub of the wheel, the nodal point for a man looking into space; it is Apollo’s central temple for the worshipper”.
   It’s been almost exactly a quarter of a century since I first climbed Jack’s Rake, and only a few times in the decades since have I arrived at the summit to find it lacking a congregation. But the sort of person who makes it up here is likely the type for whom loneliness is a thing more keenly felt in the midst of multitudes than in the solitude of a remote mountain scramble. This solitude is not one of insularity, but one wrought by the sensory onslaught of immersion in the wild and the untamed into something altogether different, and very difficult to describe.
   The odd thing is, Jack’s Rake isn’t actually a particularly difficult climb. It’s not technically difficult, it’s relatively short and it doesn’t require any real climbing skills, and, however much the senses may protest to the contrary, only for about a quarter of the route is the climber actually in any real danger. But the senses do protest to the contrary, and in that protest is a vivifying force. With the sensation of cold stone on the palms of the hands and the rush of panic at seeing the world drop away beneath your feet, an instinctual self-reliance takes over (an odd word, that: re–liance; the original double meaning is somewhat lost in our English usage), jolting us back into an ancient assemblage shattered by the forced banality of lives ripped from their source for all but these tiny splinters of time: stark, ineradicable, unintellectualised; intensely individual yet shared by every last one of the countless souls that have been nourished by this same confluence of forces. This solitude is not an escape from time and space; it is not a turning away from the world. On the contrary, it defines our very being as being in the world, attuning us to the rhythms that underpin our very existence on this planet.

[1] Word order in original

Image © James Horrox, 2011