Rudolf Otto and Emmanuel Levinas Can any good thing come from the mountains of Wyoming?

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And what is it about being in the mountains—camping, staying for a time—that moves me as no other experience can (perhaps that’s redundant—perhaps every experience moves us as no other experience can)?

When I was a child, our family went often to the mountains. If one lives in Wyoming and Nebraska, one’s cultural-societal escape from the ordinary is the mountains, just as the beach and surfing and sunning is the cultural-societal escape from the ordinary in places close to oceans. I’m not quite sure why my parents loved the mountains so much. Perhaps because camping in such places gave my father opportunity to practice the skills he learned as an Eagle Scout in the ‘30s. Who knows?

I know the sense of wonder I have always felt in the mountains parallels (but is not the same as) the sense of wonder that overcame me when I was a college freshman and heard the Kansas City Symphony on tour play the Beethoven Seventh. I’ve never been able to figure out why that particular performance moved the ground of my being as no other musical performance ever had before and perhaps none has since. Come on. The Kansas City Symphony on tour in Southern California in 1968? There is no planning for the experience of wonder.

My plan is to spend several days alone in the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming (the Snowy Range) this summer. Already, floating above the real world as I do so much of the time when I am in Dallas (I’m like the old lady on the airplane saying she did her part to keep the thing in the air; “I never put my full weight down in the seat”) I am experiencing the wonder and joy of walking among, smelling, seeing, feeling the pine (of whatever variety) forest and feeling the cool mountain air. (I will suffer no seizure activity there!)

Is it, I ask myself, feeling the joy, the safety, the love and warmth of being with family when I was a child—being together in a way we were not often together at home—that moves me beyond description (I’m not being hyperbolic or queenly dramatic; it is beyond description; description requires words, which immediately change the experience). Or is it the memory of the difference between the coolness and visual stimulation of the mountains and the flatness (except for Scotts Bluff) and, in my thinking, the barrenness of Western Nebraska?

I can revert to Rudolf Otto, my friend, and speak of the idea of the numinous.

Or can I impose another great mind into the mix:

The numinous or the sacred [le sacr´e] envelops and transports man beyond his powers and wishes. . . . The numinous annuls the links between persons by making beings participate, albeit ecstatically, in a drama not brought about willingly by them, an order in which they lose themselves. (1)

I first learned of Emmanuel Levinas participating in a graduate workshop in Rhetoric at the University of Texas at Dallas in about 1997. We didn’t pay much attention to his work except to acknowledge him as mentor of Jacques Derrida, whose work some of the class studied closely, but I didn’t have enough background even to understand.

In the mountains of Wyoming I participate “in a drama not brought about willingly by [me], an order in which [I] lose [myself].” More on this after I have time to digest my own thoughts on the matter. It’s not as simple or romantic or self-indulgent as it may sound. Notice, the passage from Levinas I quoted comes from a work on “losing oneself.” And I have coupled it in my reading with another Levinas work titled Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Is the idea of the holy coupled inextricably with “Thinking of the other?”

(1) Levinas, Emmanuel. Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. 1982. Translated by GaryD. Mole. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994.
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