Jeremy Bassetti

[On Mountains] Mountains and Sacred Peaks in the Torah

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Most people can name Sinai. If they think about it, maybe they can name Ararat too. But almost nobody thinks about how consistently mountains show up in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Some of the most dramatic moments in these books happen on high ground: a burning bush, an ark landing, a father raising a knife over his son, the Ten Commandments, the covenants that define the whole religion. It’s a pattern that continues throughout the Old Testament and appears, albeit to a lesser degree, in the New Testament.

Today I will discuss a few mountains, roughly one from each book of the Pentateuch, including my case for why the tabernacle, arguably Judaism’s first temple, should count as a mountain too.

You can also watch this post on YouTube:

A Note on El Shaddai

Before getting into the mountains themselves, a quick note on why mountains matter in the first place.

One of the epithets for God used in the Old Testament — El Shaddai — is usually translated as “God Almighty.” But that’s a poetic translation. El just means “god.” But Shaddai is generally thought to derive from the Akkadian word for mountain, šadû.¹ So a more literal rendering of El Shaddai is closer to “God of the Mountain.” The god of the Old Testament is, in this sense, a sky god who likes to conduct his business on mountains.

The association between gods and high places was common across the ancient Near East, and it becomes a load-bearing element of the Old Testament, and, to a lesser degree but not wholly absent in, the New Testament too.

Mount Ararat

The first mountain, or mountain range, named in the Bible shows up at the end of the flood story in Genesis.

God floods the earth. Noah, his family, and the animals ride it out in the ark. When the waters finally recede, the ark “came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.”²

The idea of mountain-as-refuge doesn’t stop with Noah. Lot flees to the mountains to escape the destruction of Sodom, and centuries later Jesus tells his disciples to flee to the mountains when Jerusalem falls. It’s a trope that runs the length of the whole Bible. The expression “head for the hills,” meaning “run to safety,” has biblical roots. High ground is repeatedly associated with safety.

Once the ark comes to rest and the waters recede, Noah and his family leave it behind and build an altar on the mountain. This is the Bible’s first reference to altars, worship, and sacrifice on high ground. When God smells the “pleasing aroma” of the sacrifice, he blesses Noah and his family: “be fruitful and multiply.”³

All of humanity, and every animal on earth, descends from a mountaintop to repopulate the world. The metaphor here is a sky god irrigating the world, so to speak, from a summit… not with water, but with life. It’s another recurring mountain trope, mountains as places of life and abundance.

I cover the Genesis mountains in more detail in another post.

Mount Moriah

The second mountain involves one of the most disturbing stories in the whole Bible, and it also comes from Genesis.

God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.⁴ Abraham obeys. He climbs the mountain, builds an altar, and binds Isaac for the sacrifice. At the very last second, just as the blade is about to come down, an angel stops him and provides a ram to sacrifice instead.

Abraham’s line afterward, usually translated something like “on the mount of the Lord it shall be provided,”⁵ has become almost a proverb. The idea is that God provides for, or meets the needs of, his people when they need it most. “The mount of the Lord” has become a kind of shorthand for followers of God: those who climb the mountain, metaphorically speaking, to worship god will be provided for. Here I remind you of a related mountain metaphor, Jesus as a “good shepherd” guiding his flock of “sheep.”

Mount Sinai

The third mountain comes from Exodus and is the one everyone knows: Mount Sinai.

The Old Testament sometimes uses another name for Mount Sinai — Mount Horeb. There’s some scholarly debate here, but the two names are generally understood to refer to the same place, so I’ll just use Sinai.⁶

Moses first encounters Sinai as a shepherd, when he sees the burning bush. In that scene, God tells him to remove his sandals because he’s standing on holy ground⁷… as if Moses had wandered into a temple and forgotten to take off his shoes. The mountain is holy, after all.

It’s on this mountain that God later tells Moses he’ll bring the Israelites to the “promised land,” described as “a land flowing with milk and honey”⁸. This is another metaphor of abundance, worth noting alongside the fact that the promised land is elsewhere described as “the hill country.”

Sinai is the mountain Moses disappears into and, forty days and nights later, reappears from with the Ten Commandments in hand. It’s also at the base of this mountain that the Israelites, tired of waiting, melt their gold into a calf and worship it. In the heat of the golden calf crisis, Moses smashes the tablets. So, Moses climbs back up Sinai for forty more days and nights to get a second set.⁹

I’ve written about Sinai and the burning bush at more length in my two-part series on Exodus.

Mount Hor

The fourth mountain, Mount Hor, is much smaller in drama, but it matters because it’s where a mountain becomes the site of a transfer of religious authority.

In Numbers, God tells Moses to bring his brother Aaron, along with Aaron’s son Eleazar, up Mount Hor. At the top, Moses strips Aaron of his priestly vestments and puts them on Eleazar. Aaron dies on the mountain, and Eleazar becomes the second high priest of Israel.¹⁰

It’s a quiet story compared to Sinai and Moriah, but what happens on the mountain amounts to an ordination ceremony for the priestly class. More than revelation happens on mountains. Political succession does too. Power, whether divine or human, plays out on high ground.

Mount Hor shows up again later in Numbers, marking part of the boundary of the promised land.¹¹ Scholars generally think this is a second, different mountain that happens to share the name and not the same peak where Aaron died.

Mount Nebo

The final scene of the Pentateuch happens on Mount Nebo.

In Deuteronomy, God tells Moses to climb Nebo and look out over the promised land — the land he’s led an entire generation toward for forty years. Then God does something severe: he tells Moses he’ll die there, on the mountain, without ever setting foot in the land itself.¹² The Torah ends with Moses’s death on the mountain and his burial somewhere in the valley below.

The Mountains of Moab

Bamoth-baal, Mount Pisgah, and Mount Peor appear in the Book of Numbers, when the Moabite king Balak, watching the Israelites approach, hires a sorcerer named Balaam to curse them.

The king first takes Balaam to a high place called Bamoth-baal — literally, “the high place of Baal” — builds an altar, and prepares a sacrifice.¹³ The idea is that Balaam will invoke the Moabite gods from the mountain to curse the Israelites. Instead, the god of the Israelites overrides the other gods, and a blessing comes out of Balaam’s mouth instead of a curse. The king tries again on Mount Pisgah, with the same result.¹⁴ He tries a third time on Mount Peor — same result again, except this time Balaam directly invokes the name El Shaddai, God of the Mountain, in his blessing.¹⁵

What I find interesting here is the idea that worshipping gods on mountains wasn’t exclusive to the Israelites. It appears to have been a regional practice. It wasn’t unusual in this part of the ancient world for gods to be worshipped on high places, which makes sense given how much energy the Old Testament spends condemning the “high places” of other gods. You don’t need that many laws against a practice unless the practice is common.

The Tabernacle as Mountain

The last “mountain” isn’t technically a mountain at all, but I think it should count anyway.

Back in Exodus, while Moses is up on Sinai for forty days, God gives him remarkably specific instructions for building something called the tabernacle. The Hebrew word is miškān, which simply means “dwelling place.” God tells Moses he wants this structure “so that I may dwell among” the Israelites.¹⁶

But the Tabernacle isn’t just a temple or a tent. It’s a portable copy of Sinai itself. It has the same structure of holiness: an outer court, a holy place, and an innermost holy of holies, mirroring the three sacred zones of Mount Sinai. It’s covered by the same kind of cloud that covered Sinai’s peak when God’s presence was there. God speaks to Moses from inside the Tabernacle much as he spoke to him from the summit of Sinai. It’s even sometimes called the “tent of meeting.”

It’s designed to travel through the wilderness, set up and taken down at every camp. It’s God’s mobile home. It is a manufactured, portable mountain. And this is arguably the beginning of the end of mountain worship in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The faithful can now commune with God, and offer sacrifices to him, in their cities and towns, in temples. They don’t need to go mountain climbing anymore.

One of the narrative threads of the Old Testament, in fact, might be the story of God’s gradual descent from the sky and into the temple.

This isn’t unique to Judaism, either. The Hindu temple has a long design tradition of being built explicitly as a mountain,¹⁷ as do the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and other temple structures around the world. I’ve briefly touched on this pattern of manufactured mountains elsewhere.

If you want the fuller synthesis of how this arc plays out across the whole Torah — from Ararat to the Tabernacle — I pulled all six of my Torah posts together into one long essay.

The derivation of Shaddai (שַׁדַּי) from the Akkadian šadû (“mountain”) is a widely held but not universally settled etymology among biblical scholars. ↩︎
Genesis 8:4. ↩︎
Genesis 8:20–9:1. ↩︎
Genesis 22:2. ↩︎
Genesis 22:14. ↩︎
Exodus 3:1. ↩︎
Exodus 3:5. ↩︎
Exodus 3:8. ↩︎
Exodus 24, 31–34. ↩︎
Numbers 20:22–29. ↩︎
Numbers 34:7–8. ↩︎
Deuteronomy 34. ↩︎
Numbers 22:41. ↩︎
23:14. ↩︎
Numbers 23:28–24:4. ↩︎
Exodus 25:8. ↩︎
See my post on the Hindu temple as mountain, linked above, for more on this tradition. ↩︎

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[On Mountains] New Mountain Book: 'The Pyrenees' by Colin Duncan Taylor

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Colin Duncan Taylor’s new book The Pyrenees: A Human History (Yale) is available for preorder in the UK (Aug 25) and in the USA (Sept 8). The book’s subtitle evokes another mountain book, Ed Douglas’s Himalaya: A Human History and seems to to approach the mountains similarly.

The author has lived in the Pyrenees for the past 25 years and documents his travels (and his writing) on his website.

Yale University Press marketing materials say this about the book:

The Pyrenees dominate the landscape between France and Spain, stretching from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Long thought of as an impassable, unspoiled wilderness, the mountains are often seen as both a physical and cultural barrier between western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. Yet this treacherous terrain has been inhabited and shaped by human hands for centuries.

Colin Duncan Taylor leads us through the human history of the Pyrenees, from the cave art of their first prehistoric inhabitants to today’s spa towns and ski resorts. Early pastoralists, Greek and Roman colonists, the Visigoths, and the Moors all left their mark on the mountains, which have played an outsize role in European history—as a place to live or hide, attack or defend, exploit or enjoy.

Taylor collects stories from both sides of the mountains and reveals how they have been made and remade throughout history by people from all levels of society.

As Michael Kerr reports on his blog Deskbound Traveller, Geographical Magazine recently published an excerpt of The Pyrenees.

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[Genius Loci] A Self-Study Syllabus, Gilgamesh, Audience Capture, AI Threats

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

I write to you from an airport terminal, which explains why this month’s dispatch is delayed. Not that you noticed. Most of July, before I left, belonged to a set of four-thousand-year-old texts. One was the Epic of Gilgamesh, which I read for the first time in 25 years, since I read it at the community college that now employs me. This time I’m reading it more soberly… soberly enough to notice that much of what gets called “the text” is really someone’s interpretation of it. In fact, everything is a kind of interpretation, including what we perceive, think, and create.

A Method to Start New Projects: The Self-Study Syllabus

The history of ideas as an academic discipline is young. It’s usually traced to Arthur Lovejoy, who founded the History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins in the 1920s and laid out his method in his book The Great Chain of Being. This book gave the field its founding assumption. An idea (say, “the great chain of being,” or for my purposes, “the sacred mountain”) can be traced across centuries and civilizations.

Not everyone agreed with that assumption. Michel Foucault spent the greater part of The Archaeology of Knowledge — I think — arguing more or less the opposite. What looks like one continuous idea is often several distinct ideas that use the same word. Around the same time, Quentin Skinner made a related point in his essay “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” If you read an idea outside its historical context, he argued, and you’ll mistake your own assumptions for the past’s. Ideas evolve and context matters.

I mention this all because it is related to my own project. When I look at how mountains have been imagined across thousands of years, I often wonder if I am I following one continuous idea (“sacred mountain"), or cataloguing a series of unrelated ideas that happen to share a similar concept or a landform. Lovejoy may have been concerned with “continuity” or tracing an idea throughout time, but I find myself more interested in noticing them pop up in time. In other words, I’m less interested in connecting the dots than dotting some possible connections.

These writers — Lovejoy, Foucault, Skinner — were writing for other academics mainly. Their debates assume a graduate seminar’s worth of context. But a project like mine (global in scope, aimed at a general reader) needs a method too. I have been building what I’ve started calling a “self-study syllabus,” essentially a reading list broad enough to cover the period I’m thinking about, assembled before I know which threads are worth pulling on.

What I am talking about isn’t similar to a chapter outline. An outline might be about shaping a narrative or an argument, about weaving research into a story, which is the harder and later work. A self-study syllabus is about surveying the field, getting a general sense of the lay of the land before deciding where and what to build.

Because my project is global and aims to be rooted in the history of ideas, I started with the earliest textual records we have, those from Mesopotamia. This part of my syllabus contained primary sources like Gilgamesh, the Enuma Elish, the Gudea Cylinders, the old Sumerian Bilgames stories, some myths and so-called “dialog” literature, some cultural artifacts like the Babylonian Map of the World, and so on. During the first part of the upcoming fall semester, my goal is to finish primary research into Mesopotamia.

From here I have a few directions I could go next: the Judeo-Christian world, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece. While my instinct is to move chronologically, it is hard to do in this case. What is most important here, though, is committing to an area not too far afield and exhausting it. Do no read around willy-nilly, no not skip straight to synthesis. Survey a period on its own terms before deciding what you actually want to say about it.

Reading Gilgamesh

The first place my syllabus took me this month was back to the Epic of Gilgamesh — a text I hadn’t read in decades. I had forgotten how good it is (had I known to begin with?). Gilgamesh is a great, if strange work. The hero is a tyrant. He is violent, rash, and hard to root for. As a human, he mostly sucks. But he grieves for his dead friend, and that grief earns the reader’s sympathy. His friend’s death changed him. The story is fascinating, complicated, and full or literary and cultural tropes we would recognize in any Hollywood movie or modern book: literary cliffhangers, antiheroes and complicated characters, men sowing their wild oats and women “domesticating” them, human pride and the destruction of the environment, and so on.

My first reading many years ago was a narrative retelling. This time, I wanted as close to a literal translation as possible. I settled on Sophus Helle’s newish translation. Though I wish I had known before buying Helle’s book that, while his translation seems faithful, the translator is nonetheless a poet and he took poetic liberties — he even says as much in the introduction.

Helles’s translation is good. But the gold standard — even Helle acknowledges this — is Andrew George’s two-volume Oxford edition. Heavily annotated, George’s academic edition is the one every serious scholar works from. It is not to be confused with George’s earlier, more affordable Penguin edition of Gilgamesh aimed at general readers. I went looking for the scholarly edition after finishing Helle’s translation. I found a copy in a library. It’s magnificent, and it costs about $600 for both volumes — accessible to institutions, to research libraries, to perhaps a handful of scholars, and to almost no one else. George’s Penguin edition is, taking everything else into account, might be the best for everyday readers.

Since finishing Gilgamesh I’ve been reading further into Mesopotamian letters. I read again the Enuma Elish, the Gudea Cylinders, and the old Sumerian Bilgames stories. A lot of the Mesopotamian texts can be found on the electronic Babylonian Library, the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and other online repositories.

I wrote about each on my On Mountains blog:

Fortunately, most of the Mesopotamian primary texts are short. However, the secondary scholarship is not, and it’s a real hazard for a project like mine — endlessly interesting and available and capable of eating the time I should be spending moving forward. My plan is to read the primary sources first, see which threads are worth pulling, compile my thoughts, and then dive into the secondary sources.

Rebuilding my YouTube Channel Around the Work

For a few years I’d been posting photography-adjacent content on YouTube. I used photography as the entry point into what was interesting me. I’d talk about my Bolivia work, for instance, through a photography lens. In these vidoes, my main interest (mountains) was secondary to the tool (the camera). In hindsight, that was backwards. Photography should have lived at the margins of that discourse, not be the frame around it. But the photography angle was the easier sell, and I built a small audience on YouTube because of it.

Eighteen months ago, I made a video on the photographer Josef Koudelka that was meant mostly to encourage other photographers to do more with less. This video alone pulled in over 550 new subscribers (over 25% of my total number) and helped get my channel monetized. I don’t care much about subscriber counts as an end in themselves, but they matter when the algorithm determines whether to keep showing your work to others. For me, this meant that video was quietly training YouTube to find me more people who wanted similar photography videos, not more people who were interested in my projects and research.

This is the much-feared “audience capture.” It is the way a platform’s feedback loop can push creators into creating more of whatever already struck a nerve. This is why some bands never evolve. “Audience capture” trains you to ignore your interests in favor of that which “performs” better.

I keep thinking of Kierkegaard’s claim here, that “the crowd is untruth.” Shaping your work to what will be legible and popular to the masses is at odds with pursuing “truth” or what’s actually worth making. Pandering to the algorithm is about conformity and consensus (like the outputs LLMs produce), and doing so betrays the self, the spirit, the individual.

My Bolivia video — the video of mine I’d argue is the most historically and culturally substantial one I’ve made — has picked up only around 200 views since March, making it the lowest-performing video I’ve ever posted. The photo community (the community to which most of my subscribers belong) doesn’t care about the subject at all. Fine. But this means that, if I want to continue on my current channel, I need to start over. It means letting the old, photography-interested subscribers slough off and building a new catalog of videos.

This isn’t really a YouTube problem, or even really a me problem. It’s the problem anyone doing slow, specific work runs into the moment they try to work in public view: the thing that gets you noticed is rarely the thing you actually want to be known for. More people are searching for the latest camera from a well-known manufacturer than for your weird, specific, nerdy project. That gap is the difficulty.

I unlisted most of the old photography-focused videos. And I am rebooting my YouTube channel with my mountain work as the organizing principle — subscribers be damned. Photography stays, but only as a tool in service of the larger work, not a topic of its own. I’ve posted a ”Welcome to My Channel” trailer, along with a piece on mountains in the Bible and their bearing on the crucifixion story that probably nobody will watch. There’s also an angle of my new study, still a little cluttered, in the new videos if you’re interested in seeing how it turned out.

LLMs and Life.

Is AI Killing “Informational” Writing?

Tim Ferriss recently wrote about the collapse of his own prescriptive nonfiction book sales — down roughly 80% since 2022, on current trend. He writes: “The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh.” His more interesting claim is that: “The market for information is collapsing into the chatbot. The market for transformation—for sitting with one mind at length on a subject it has bled for—might get smaller, but stranger and more interesting.”

On a subject that someone has bled for.

Nonfiction is broader than the prescriptive, how-to end of the shelf, but the decline isn’t isolated to the genre Ferriss operates in. Travel writers and bloggers have watched their informational posts get swallowed whole by AI tools that answer the question directly, without sending anyone to the source. It’s a rerun of an earlier disruption lead by the bloggers themselves: guidebook sales evaporated once bloggers and social media influencers started giving the same information away for free and in different formats.

If Ferriss is right that the market for information is collapsing, the real question becomes: which kinds of nonfiction books are doing something a chatbot can’t?

I’d like to think that history, narrative nonfiction, current affairs, journalism, and the like are kinds of nonfiction genres the chatbot can’t do well. People who don’t read history often assume, understandably, that it’s a chronicle of settled facts. It isn’t. It’s an interpretation of the past, a story built out of events, sometimes advancing genuinely new research or evidence, but just as often simply telling the same past in a new, more illuminating way. That act of interpretation is the historian’s actual job. It is not a job an LLM trained to predict the next likely word can do, because there’s no “likely” version of a genuinely new interpretation of the past — only a synthesis of readings that already exist. Ted Chiang made this point about AI-generated text in general: a large language model is, in his phrase, a blurry JPEG of the web — compressed, lossy, a reconstruction of what’s already there, warts and all. It can remix, but it can’t have bled for anything. The kind of nonficiton writing that might survive will be the kind built on lived experience, interpretation, and the new/now.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

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[On Mountains] The Lord to the Living One's Mountain: A Sumerian Gilgamesh Story

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The Epic of Gilgamesh, as most readers encounter it, comes from what scholars call the “Standard Babylonian Version,” compiled sometime between 1300 and 1000 BCE. But according to Andrew George, the leading scholar on the epic, Sumerian stories of the hero predate that standard version by nearly 2,000 years.¹ Roughly five Sumerian versions of the Gilgamesh story survive.² One of them, known as Bilgames and Huwawa Version A, was popular enough in antiquity that it made the list of texts a scribe-in-training was expected to consult.³ Because so many students transcribed it, more copies of this version have survived than of most other Gilgamesh texts, and it’s in a remarkably complete state.

In Sumerian, Gilgamesh is rendered as Bilgames and Humbaba as Huwawa. Ancient scribes named texts by their opening line, and this one’s opening line was The Lord to the Living One’s Mountain, which is how the story came to be known in the ancient catalogs.

The story shares some ground with the Standard Babylonian Epic, but it reads more like its own, self-contained tale than a “missing” episode of the epic we know today. It’s included in some modern translations of Gilgamesh, including Andrew George’s Penguin Classics edition.

Mountains and Immortality

In The Lord to the Living One’s Mountain, Bilgames confronts the fact of human mortality before his friend and servant Enkidu dies. This is a key difference from the Standard Version, where it’s Enkidu’s death that triggers Gilgamesh’s fear of death. Thinking about his own end, Bilgames turns his attention to the “Living One’s mountain.” The so-called “Living One” is Huwawa, or Humbaba. Bilgames tells Enkidu:

O Enkidu, since no man can escape life’s end, I will enter the mountain and set up my name. Where names are set up, I will set up my name, where names are not yet set up, I will set up gods’ names.⁴

What do we make of this? The most natural reading is that Bilgames means to make a name for himself, to accomplish some feat on Huwawa’s mountain, a slope draped in cedars like a green mantle, that will outlast him.

It’s worth pausing on how this differs from the Standard Babylonian Version. There, Gilgamesh and Enkidu attack Humbaba before Gilgamesh becomes preoccupied with mortality. It’s only after they defeat Humbaba and Enkidu subsequently dies that Gilgamesh becomes fixated of his own death and sets out to find Uta-napishti. In The Lord to the Living One’s Mountain, the order is reversed: the fear of death comes first, and it’s what sends Bilgames toward the mountain in the first place.

Enkidu, in this Sumerian tale, advises Bilgames to consult the sun god Utu before going to the mountain.Utu, the Sumerian god, is known later in Akkadian as Shamash, and both names simply mean “sun.” As Enkidu puts it:

Things to do with the mountain are Utu’s concern.⁵

Mountains and sun gods are frequently linked in Mesopotamian thought. Various mountain ranges sat at the edge of the imagined Mesopotamian world, the places where the sun was believed to rise and set. The Babylonian Map of the World, as you can see in the image below, places mountains at the very edges of the world.

Babylonian Map of the World. Note the triangular mountains around the edges.

When Bilgames makes his offering to Utu, he explains when he first became concerned with death and why he wants to visit the mountain:

I raised my head on the rampart, my gaze fell on a corpse drifting down the river, afloat on the water: I too shall become like that, just so shall I be! “No man can stretch to the sky, no matter how tall, no man can compass a mountain, no matter how broad!” Since no man can escape life’s end, I will enter the mountain and set up my name. Where names are set up, I will set up my name, where names are not yet set up, I will set up gods’ names.⁶

What strikes me here is how Bilgames equates immortality, or remembrance, or fame with mountains. The mountain — vast, imposing, unmovable — is a metaphor for the kind of monumental deed worth remembering. Cutting cedar from Huwawa’s mountain, in this reading, is the method for that metaphor. One achieves a kind of immortality through deeds, especially large ones that benefit others or that get preserved in story, which is exactly what the opening tablet of the Standard Babylonian Epic suggests happened to Gilgamesh himself.

It’s also worth noting that even in the Standard Version, where Gilgamesh isn’t yet worried about immortality when he sets out to kill Humbaba, mountains still shadow his eventual quest for eternal life. After Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh crosses the “Twin Mountains” to search for immortality. Whichever version you read, his path to immortality runs through mountains.

Crossing Mountains, A Metaphor for Immortality

When Bilgames addresses Utu in Version A of The Lord to the Living One’s Mountain, he quotes the line:

“No man can stretch to the sky, no matter how tall, no man can compass a mountain, no matter how broad!”

A close variant of this line shows up in Version B of the story, a less commonly found text than Version A. There, Bilgames speaks a similar line, but he says it earlier before he addresses Utu. And, in Version B, the metaphor narrows to mountains alone, dropping the sky. Bilgames says early in Version B:

“No man can reach across a mountain, no matter how lofty, no man can compass a mountain, no matter how broad!”

Both versions put this line in Bilgames’s mouth as he laments his mortality, so its meaning in both instances is clear enough. This is an expression that uses mountain metaphors to convey the fact that no man can achieve immortality, no man can live forever. In other words, crossing a mountain, or “compassing” one — perhaps “surveying” or “knowing it well” or “walking its full circumference” — is a Mesopotamian metaphor for immortality. This is why in the story Bilgames wants to visit the literal mountain. The expression is turned into narrative.

I can only speculate here why mountains are linked to immortality, fame, and memory. In the Mesopotamian world, mountains are literally and symbolically far-off places. The gods are honored in temples and ziggurats that are high. They were not only high and looked like mountains, but they were imagined to be mountains and their construction was comprised out of mountain materials (as we saw in the Gudea Cylinders).

The Lord to the Living One’s Mountain: A Synopsis, by Andrew George

Below is Andrew George’s synopsis of The Lord to the Living One’s Mountain taken from his Penguin Classics edition. I hope reading this will entice you to buy the edition, as I recommend it over the others as a starting point. It comes with the standard Gilgamesh story, of course, but also contains extensive commentary, context, and a range of other Mesopotamian texts, including the complete Lord to the Living One’s Mountain.

In fear of death Bilgames turns his thoughts to deeds of glory and proposes an expedition to the fabled Cedar Mountain, where dwelt the Living One. This epithet apparently refers to its guardian spirit, the demigod Huwawa. In early tradition the Cedar Mountain was far in the east, where the sun rose. Bilgames’s servant Enkidu tells him that he should seek the approval of the Sun God, Utu (the Sumerian Shamash). This Bilgames does, giving as the reason for the expedition that he has seen the impermanence of the human condition and wishes to establish his fame. Utu grants him the help of seven constellations, which will guide him on his journey. Bilgames mobilizes the young men of Uruk, arms them and sets out. The constellations guide him to the mountains where cedars grow. After crossing seven mountain ranges in search of a suitable tree, finally he finds one to his liking. Without further ado he fells the chosen cedar and his companions cut it into logs. Thereupon Huwawa, the cedars’ guardian, awakes and launches at Bilgames one of his auras, the radiant numinous powers that protect him. Bilgames and Enkidu are stunned and fall unconscious. Enkidu wakes and eventually rouses Bilgames too. Bilgames swears to learn more of their assailant. Enkidu describes to him the terrible being that is Huwawa but Bilgames is confident that the two of them will succeed where one would fail.

As they approach Huwawa’s dwelling Bilgames is stopped in his tracks and the voice of Huwawa calls to him, telling him not to be afraid but to kneel on the ground. Bilgames then pretends to wish to form a marital alliance with Huwawa and offers him his sisters, Enmebaragesi and Peshtur, to be his wives. He promises Huwawa other pleasures of life that are evidently unknown in his remote mountain lair: fine flour and water in leathern bottles, sandals large and small, choice gemstones and other presents. For the betrothal of the sisters and the promise of each further gift Huwawa surrenders one of his protective auras. These are conceptualized as great cedars, which Bilgames’s men duly cut into logs for the journey home. When Huwawa has no auras left and is helpless to attack, Bilgames shows his true colours. He strikes him and takes him prisoner. Huwawa then pleads for his life, complaining to Utu of Bilgames’s treachery. Bilgames shows him princely mercy but Enkidu warns that this is too dangerous: if they let Huwawa go they will never see home again. As Huwawa turns on Enkidu in anger, Enkidu cuts his throat. The heroes take his head to the god Enlil. Enlil angrily asks them why they have killed Huwawa and tells them they should instead have treated him with every courtesy. In conclusion Enlil distributes Huwawa’s auras.⁷

A.R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 4. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 7. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 8. ↩︎
Andrew George, trans., The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian (London: Penguin Classics, 1999), p. 151. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 151, line 11. ↩︎
Ibid., lines 24–33. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 149–150. ↩︎

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[On Mountains] The Enuma Elish and the High Temples of Babylon

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The Enuma Elish is one of the oldest creation story we have on record, written down roughly 3,000 years ago on cuneiform tablets in Mesopotamia. Like most ancient texts, it takes its title from its opening words rather than from anything we’d recognize as a proper title today. Enuma Elish means “When on high” or “When above,” and before the story has even started, we’re given a hint of what’s to come. This is a story about literal and symbolic height.

Being a creation story, the Enuma Elish covers a lot of ground: the birth of the gods, the shaping of the earth, the making of humans. But it’s the poem’s opening lines that set the tone for everything that follows:

When on high no word was used for heaven / Nor below was firm ground called by name.¹

These lines describe a time prior to creation, a time before language and understanding. This was a time of formless chaos. But notice how the text uses verticality to describe that formlessness. Heaven is “on high.” Ground is “below.” In a world before creation, up and down help structure the Mesopotamian imagination. The same is true for the world after creation, as we will see.

In Mesopotamian language itself, sky, heaven, and divinity are bound together as a single concept. The word / logogram for “heaven,” AN (𒀭), is also the word for “sky” and “god.”

But the gods of the Enuma Elish aren’t confined to the sky. They preside over the underworld, the earth, the waters. The poem opens with a cosmic ocean, a primordial water that is, at first, all there is. From it come Anshar, “the whole sky,” and Kishar, “the whole earth,” a male and female principle whose union produces the rest of the gods and goddesses (and arguably everything else). Divinity, in other words, spans the whole vertical axis: down into the deep waters, up into the high heavens, and everywhere in between.

A Family Drama

The Enuma Elish is less a tidy account of creation than an unruly family drama. The younger gods grow restless and noisy, and the older gods — wanting some peace and quiet like stereotypical old-timers — start plotting against them. The details of the plot don’t matter much here; what matters is the outcome. The young gods outmaneuver their elders, Marduk is chosen to lead their defense, and he emerges from the conflict as the supreme god of the pantheon. There’s no mountain imagery in this part of the story. It’s cosmic genealogy and family feud more than anything else, but it sets up everything that follows.

Having defeated the old gods, Marduk turns his attention to a more practical problem. Who’s going to do all the work in this new world? He decides that humans “shall bear the gods’ toil.”² Humans are created specifically so that the gods can stop laboring and finally rest. Grateful for that freedom, the gods decide to build Marduk a city and a house.

Building Marduk a House

Like the Sumerian Gudea Cylinders — a text I’ve written about before — the Enuma Elish includes an account of temple building, though a much briefer one. There’s no explicit mountain imagery here, but there is a strong sense of verticality and loftiness. The gods decide to build Marduk’s temple high, and they build it in a new city made for the purpose: Babylon.

Then build Babylon the task as that you requested, / Let bricks be formed for it, build high the shrine.³

The temple they build for Marduk is called Esagila, a name that means something like “house whose top is high.” One scholar renders it as “structure with upraised head.”⁴ Either way, we understand the insistence on height.

It took the gods one year to build Babylon.

When the second year came, / They raised the head of Esagila, the counterpart to Apsu. / They built the lofty ziggurat of Apsu. / For Anu, Enlil, Ea and him they founded the dwelling. He took his seat in splendor before them.⁵

The Counterpart of Apsu?

This passage is a small puzzle worth pausing on. Why does Apsu show up here? And what does it mean to call Esagila its “counterpart”?

Apsu, along with Tiamat, is one of the two primordial god-waters that open the poem. Earlier in the story, Apsu is killed by the god Ea, who then makes Apsu’s remains his own dwelling place. (Here, as with a lot of Mesopotamian myth, it helps to let go of strict logic: Apsu is a god with agency, but he’s also a place — the literal deep, underground water. It’s a name that resurfaces, conceptually if not by name, in the opening lines of the Epic of Gilgamesh and at other points in the poem.)

So when the poem calls the new shrine the “counterpart to Apsu,” it may be signaling direction as much as anything: if Apsu is down, this new structure is up. The “ziggurat of Apsu” becomes its own kind of anchor, a vertical line running from the depths, through the earth, and into the heavens… a kind of axis mundi. There’s a nice family logic to this, too: Ea, who slew Apsu, is Marduk’s father. And Marduk killed Apsu’s counterpart, Tiamat. Building a monument that reaches up from Apsu’s remains ties father to son in a single line of cosmic authority.

Other scholars read the passage more simply, arguing that “Apsu” here functions “in this context [as] a synonym for the sky.”⁶ Either reading keeps us on the same vertical axis the poem has been tracing from the very first line.

Spread from Koldewey's 1914 book 'The Excavation at Babylon' showing the sites of the two adjacent temples, Esagila and Etemenanki.

Two Temples, Not One?

I’m not convinced by these interpretations. To me, the passage above reads as if it refers to a second temple — the lofty ziggurat of Apsu — and not one. Neither is Andrew George who, writing about the archaeology behind this passage, notes, “There is no reason to doubt that this ziqqurrat, described as ziqqurrat apsî elite, ’the upper ziqqurrat of the Apsû,’ was Etemenanki.”⁷

It is reasonable to believe that Marduk’s temple described in the Enuma Elish isn’t the same as Babylon’s more famous and larger ziggurat, the Etemenanki (“Temple of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth”), which likely influenced the biblical account of the Tower of Babel. Marduk’s temple Esagila, named in the Enuma Elish, was the temple complex at ground level. The Etemenanki ziggurat, which isn’t explicitly named in the myth, was the towering ziggurat just north of Esagila and the more monumental structure of the two.

The cover image of this post is an illustration of the two temples within ancient Babylon. Etemenanki is the taller, stepped structure within walls to the north (left in the image) of the Esagila (the small structure on the right of the image). The second image, a few paragraphs above, show the site plan. Both illustrations come from The Excavations at Babylon by Robert Koldewey (1914).⁸

The Enuma Elish describes the founding of Esagila, though, as George’s comment suggests, the poem’s language likely references Etemenanki alongside it.

So, it is reasonable to believe that there are two distinct temples in referenced in the Enuma Elish:

“They raised the head of Esagila, the counterpart to Apsu”
“They built the lofty ziggurat of Apsu,” which was properly a ziggurat unlike Esagila and which Andrew George identifies as Etemenanki.

Though, I think it is safe to say that the text is ambiguous and no conclusions can be drawn. What can’t be disputed, however, is the fact that the Enuma Elish does refer to ziggurats and lofty temples as a central, organizing principle of the city of Babylon.

Babylon as Nexus

Once Marduk’s temple is complete, the poem goes on to describe temples built for the other gods and goddesses as well. Babylon, and Esagila at its center, comes to be described as a kind of “nexus” of the Mesopotamian pantheon.⁹

This interpretation is informed in the etymology of the name Babylon. The cuneiform spelling of Babylon is KÁ.DIG̃IR.RAKI. The sign 𒆍 (KÁ) is the logogram for “gate”, while 𒀭 (DIG̃IR) refers to “god.” Babylon — like its Semitic form Babel — is thus literally the “gate of god.” This etymology appears to be disputed of late, so I need to do more research into it. But the imagery is nice. Babylon, the great Mesopotamian city with temples and the seat of Marduk, serves as a kind of gateway to the divine.

Heinrich, A. C. (2021). Poem of Creation (Enūma eliš), Chapter I. With contributions by Z. J. Földi and E. Jiménez. Translated by Anmar A. Fadhil and Benjamin R. Foster. electronic Babylonian Library. https://doi.org/10.5282/ebl/l/1/2. All passages from the Enuma Elish come from this source unless otherwise noted. ↩︎
Ibid., Chapter VI, line 8. ↩︎
Ibid., Chapter VI, lines 57–58. ↩︎
“Mesopotamian Motifs in the Early Chapters of Genesis,” Expedition Magazine, Penn Museum. https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/mesopotamian-motifs-in-the-early-chapters-of-genesis/ ↩︎
Heinrich, A. C. (2021), Chapter VI, lines 61–65. ↩︎
“Mesopotamian Motifs in the Early Chapters of Genesis,” Expedition Magazine, Penn Museum. https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/mesopotamian-motifs-in-the-early-chapters-of-genesis/ ↩︎
George, Andrew (2007). “The Tower of Babel: Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts.” Archiv für Orientforschung, 51 (2005/2006), pp. 75–95. ↩︎
Koldewey, Robert. The Excavations at Babylon. London: Macmillan and Co., 194. Via the Internet Archive ↩︎
“The Tower of Babel: A Polemic Against Marduk’s Temple Esagil,” TheTorah.com. https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-tower-of-babel-a-polemic-against-marduks-temple-esagil ↩︎

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[On Mountains] New Mountain Book: 'Upland' by Ed Douglas

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Today marks the publication date for Ed Douglas’s new book, Upland: The Strange History and Vital Future of Britain’s Mountains (Bodley Head). Douglas previously wrote Himalaya: A Human History, but this time he’s turned his attention closer to home, tracing the story of Britain’s own mountains. Or, perhaps it is the story of Britain through its mountains, as Richard Smyth suggests in his review of the book in Literary Review (paywall). Smyth says, the book “is not so much a history of our uplands as a history of early Britain with the uplands left in.”

Marketing materials describe Upland as “the first complete history of Britain’s mountains, capturing their beauty, tragedy and the pivotal role of these dramatic landscapes in the nation’s past and future.”

Douglas discussed the book on the Travels Through Time podcast (Apple Podcasts), and the conversation suggests a well-researched work of history that touches on current debates in mountain studies. Per the conversation, the ghost of Marjorie Hope Nicolson appears.

Upland is out now in the UK, but it’s unclear if or when it will reach other markets. For reference, Himalaya took a little over a year to arrive in North America after its UK release. In the meantime, ebook and audiobook editions are available through UK retailers like Amazon UK and Bookshop UK, which should make the book somewhat easier to access from abroad.

I’ll report back if and when I get my hands on a copy.

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[On Mountains] The Temple as Mountain in the Sumerian Gudea Cylinders

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

A recurring motif in sacred architecture is that temples are imagined as mountains. We see this in monumental structures like pyramids, but also in far smaller temples and houses of worship. I call these built structures manufactured mountains, for lack of a better term, because the pattern turns out to be remarkably widespread, showing up in the Judeo-Christian tradition, across Mesoamerica, on the Indian subcontinent, and just about everywhere in between. What I want to look at today is this idea in Mesopotamia. But instead of focusing on the structure of the ziggurat, I want to look at a little-known work of Sumerian literature, a myth called Building Ningirsu’s Temple found on the Gudea Cylinders, in what might be the earliest account of a temple as a manufactured mountain.

Building a House for Ningirsu

The Gudea Cylinders are a pair of clay cylinders from the third millennium BCE, inscribed in cuneiform with a Sumerian story called Building Ningirsu’s Temple. Ningirsu was the patron deity of Lagash, a city-state in southern Mesopotamia not far from where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. As the title suggests, the text recounts the building of Ningirsu’s temple, known as the E-ninnu, under the rule of Lagash’s governor, Gudea.

The story opens with Gudea receiving instructions to build Ningirsu’s temple. These instructions come first in a dream he doesn’t understand, then, after he asks for clarification, in a second dream that spells things out. It’s here that Ningirsu describes his future house as “bigger than the mountains.”¹ He goes on to promise Gudea that building the temple will bring the land prosperity:

When you, true shepherd Gudea, really set to work for me on my house, the foremost house of all lands, the right arm of Lagaš, the Anzud bird roaring on the horizon, the E-ninnu, my royal house, I will call up to heaven for humid winds so that plenty comes down to you from heaven and the land will thrive under your reign in abundance. Laying the foundations of my temple will bring immediate abundance: the great fields will grow rich for you, the levees and ditches will be full to the brim for you, the water will rise for you to heights never reached by the water before. Under you more oil than ever will be poured and more wool than ever will weighed in Sumer. When you drive in my foundation pegs for me, when you really set to work for me on my house, I shall direct my steps to the mountains where the north wind dwells and make the man with enormous wings, the north wind, bring you wind from the mountains, the pure place, so that this will give vigour to the Land, and thus one man will be able to do as much work as two. At night the moonlight, at noon the sun will send plentiful light for you so the day will build the house for you and the night will make it rise for you.²

It is worth noting here that Lagash sits on flat alluvial land, nowhere near a mountain in southern Mesopotamia.

It is also worth noting here that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh has dreams about mountains, yet he has his dreams in makeshift temples on actual mountain peaks. The connection with mountains and dreams, which are but forms of revelation, might be worth exploring at a later time.

Built High as a Mountain

Gudea does build the temple as instructed, and the text is explicit about the comparison:

The ruler built the house, he made it high, high as a great mountain.³

Even the temple’s sections are described as mountains. Its front is “a great mountain.” Its wine cellar is “a mountain oozing wine.” Its coach house is “a mountain.” Its stone stairway is “like a mountain range lying down in princely joy.” One damaged section of the cylinder even describes an unknown part of the temple as “a firmly founded lapis lazuli mountain connecting heaven and earth.”⁴ We can read all this mountain talk as simple hyperbole — mountains are often a metaphor for strength and greatness.

Ningirsu’s House, “mooring post of the Land, grown so high as to fill the space between heaven and earth, E-ninnu, the true brickworks, for which Enlil determined a good fate, green hill standing to be marveled at, standing out above all the lands! The house is a great mountain reaching up to the skies.⁵

The house reaches up to heaven like a huge mountain and its fearsomeness and radiance have settled upon the Land. An and Enlil have determined the fate of Lagaš; Ninĝirsu’s authority has become known to all the countries; E-ninnu has grown so high as to fill the space between heaven and earth. Ninĝirsu be praised!⁶

On multiple occasions, the text reaches for the same image. The temple closes the gap between heaven and earth, built to mountain scale. But the text keeps pushing past metaphor. The temple is mountain-like because it is a mountain.

Mountains in Every Stone

The temple imagined as a mountain makes even more sense once we note where the temple’s building materials come from. The cedar was cut from the cedar-covered hills of what’s presumably Lebanon and floated down the Euphrates. Stone, bitumen, and gypsum arrived the same way, ferried downriver from distant highlands:

Lord Ninĝirsu directed Gudea into the impenetrable mountain of cedars and he cut down its cedars with great axes and carved the Šar-ur, the right arm of Lagaš, his master’s flood-storm weapon, out of it. It was like a giant serpent floating on the water as, for Lord Ninĝirsu, Gudea had the long rafts floating downstream moor at the main quay of Kan-sura: logs of cedar wood from the cedar hills, logs of cypress wood from the cypress hills, logs of zabalum wood from the zabalum hills, tall spruce trees, plane trees, and eranum trees. Lord Ninĝirsu directed Gudea into the impenetrable mountains of stones and he brought back great stones in the form of slabs. For Lord Ninĝirsu, Gudea had ships with ḫauna dock there, and ships with gravel, with dried bitumen, …… bitumen, and gypsum from the hills of Madga, cargoes like boats bringing grain from the fields. Great things came to the succour of the ruler building the E-ninnu: a copper mountain in Kimaš revealed itself to him. He mined its copper onto rafts. To the man in charge of building his master’s house, the ruler, gold was brought in dust form from its mountains. For Gudea refined silver was brought down from its mountains. Translucent cornelian from Meluḫa was spread before him. From the alabaster mountains alabaster was brought down to him.⁷

Cedar, stone, copper, gold, silver, carnelian, alabaster — the list reads like an inventory of mountain resources in places far from Lagash. If the temple is described as being mountain-like, it is perhaps because it is made of actual mountains.

Manufactured Mountain

In a southern Mesopotamian landscape without mountains, the temple becomes a stand-in for one. A temple is a house for the gods built from mountain materials, standing in for the real thing where the real thing doesn’t exist. This is, as far as I can tell, one of the earliest literary examples of a pattern that shows up again and again in the ancient world: the temple as a manufactured mountain, a built peak for gods who are otherwise enjoy dwelling on actual summits.

This idea didn’t stay confined to Sumer. It is something we see in Exodus, among other works of literature. It’s not hard to see that it would surface later in Judeo-Christian thought, and the scholar Richard Averbeck offers one small but telling clue:

An apt lexical illustration is the well-known but clearly non-Semitic word in the Hebrew Bible, hekal, ‘palace, temple’, which derives originally from Sumerian E-GAL, ‘big house’, via the Sumerian loanword in East Semitic Akkadian, ekallu. True, the connection from Sumerian to Hebrew is indirect here, but it is clearly a Hebrew word that has its ultimate origin in Sumerian.⁸

The Cuneiform Logogram for “Temple”

It’s perhaps interesting to pause on a single cuneiform sign: E (𒂍), the word for “temple” or “house.” Its evolution is worth seeing. The logogram starts out looking like a tall structure with a doorway, flattens into something like a floor plan, and eventually abstracts into the wedge-shaped strokes of cuneiform.

Temple Evolution in Cuneiform (Sound *E*). Source: *A Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiquities*, p. 22.

Is the early symbol a tall structure with a doorway, or just a doorway? Is it an entire house? It is hard to say. Whatever it may be, it clearly exhibits a vertical form as opposed to the more horizontal, say, ranch-style home in which I live. Which is to say: I wonder if the association between verticality and temples or, here, “house,” was implied very early on. I also wonder about the association between temples and gateways (through the image of the door), and the association between mountains and gateways, like we see in the Epic of Gilgamesh and elsewhere.

Assyriology and the Bible: A Postscript on Connections

There’s a corner of Mesopotamian studies devoted to tracing the connections between ancient Mesopotamian texts and the Bible. Drawing a straight line between Mesopotamia and ancient Judea is hard to do, but the field has built a compelling case for indirect connections. Instead of connections, perhaps we can only draw parallels. The most famous example is probably the flood narrative, where Noah’s story in Genesis lines up nicely with the story of Uta-napishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. While we cannot say how one story came to influence the other, the parallels are nonetheless too striking to ignore. Many other parallels run between Sumerian literature and the Bible more broadly.⁹

One literary parallel that gets much less attention than the flood story involves the Gudea Cylinders, a Sumerian temple-building story, and its Biblical counterparts, most notably in 1 Kings. Those lines have already been drawn by R. E. Averbeck, so I won’t sketch them out here.¹⁰ But what I want to do instead is read the Gudea Cylinders closely because it describes a temple in an important way: the temple as a house of god is like a mountain, built from its resources. I wonder if this is the first (if not, it certainly is one of the firsts) accounts of a temple as a manufactured mountain.

Gudea Cylinders, 241–247. Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. ↩︎
Ibid., 277–305. ↩︎
Ibid., 602–616. ↩︎
Ibid., 738–758, 759–769, 770–780, and 673–687. ↩︎
Ibid., 815–823. ↩︎
Ibid., 1355–1361. ↩︎
Ibid., 405–445. ↩︎
Richard E. Averbeck, “Sumer, the Bible, and Comparative Method: Historiography and Temple Building,” in Mark W. Chavalas and K. Lawson Younger (eds.), Mesopotamia and the Bible: Comparative Explorations (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2002), 94. ↩︎
As S. N. Kramer observed as early as 1959, at least fifteen motifs recur in both the Bible and Sumerian literature: creation from a primeval sea, humanity fashioned from clay and given the breath of life, creation by both divine command and divine “making,” paradise narratives, the flood, sibling-rivalry stories like Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, the ordering of the earth, the personal god, law and law codes, ethics and morals, divine retribution, the plague motif, the suffering of the righteous, and the bleakness of the netherworld. Quoted in Averbeck (2002), 90. See S. N. Kramer, “Sumerian Literature and the Bible,” AnBib 12: 189–204. ↩︎
See Richard E. Averbeck, “The Cylinders of Gudea,” COS II: 417–33, and Aberbeck (2002), 88–125. ↩︎

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[On Mountains] Mountains in the Epic of Gilgamesh

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The Epic of Gilgamesh is widely regarded as the world’s oldest surviving work of literature. The oldest examples of human writing, trace back to the same Mesopotamian societies that produced it. Any investigation into the history of ideas therefore begins with texts like Gilgamesh and its contemporaries, the religious and mythological works recovered from cuneiform tablets in archaeological digs.

It is in the representational forms of human creation, like literature and art, that the historian of ideas finds the best evidence to work with. Material remains can tell us a great deal about what our ancestors did, and can hint at what they thought. But it is in our ancestors’ utterances and depictions that we find the clearest articulations of ideas, and clearest relationships between them.

Because I’m working on a project about the intellectual and cultural history of mountains, I was naturally curious to see what the oldest writing might say about them. As humanity’s earliest work literature, Gilgamesh was the obvious place to start. There’s a second reason to start here, too. Mesopotamian ideas shaped regional ideas, including those of the Semitic cultures that emerged in Mesopotamia’s wake and came to dominate the region. It’s worth noting here that Akkadian, one of the languages in which Gilgamesh was written, is itself a Semitic language like Hebrew and Arabic. Simply put, Mesopotamian thought is foundational in the global history of ideas.

Mesopotamia’s regional influence is well established. There are strong parallels, for instance, between the Flood story in the Old Testament story in the Old Testament and the much older Flood story recounted by Uta-napishti in Gilgamesh. The epic’s reach may extend even further: scholars have noted resemblances between Gilgamesh and Greek heroes like Heracles. But my aim here isn’t to dwell on these similarities, or to account for how the ideas traveled.¹ It’s to do something simpler — to give an account of mountains in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Mountains in Mesopotamia

Before turning to the text, some geography is in order. I want to start with the physical mountains of Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia lies mostly within present-day Iraq. The name comes from the Greek for the land “between two rivers,” and the two rivers are the Tigris and the Euphrates. Both rise in the mountains to the northwest, in present-day Turkey and Syria, then run down through the Iraqi desert before emptying into the Persian Gulf in the southeast. The land between them — especially toward the southeastern stretch where they converge — is far more fertile than the surrounding country, and an ideal place to settle. Even today, a large share of Iraq’s population lives along the banks and watersheds of these two rivers.

The Tigris and Euphrates nearly meet at present-day Baghdad before widening apart again. They finally join at Al-Qurnah — literally the “corner,” “connection,” or “joint” in Arabic — north of Basra before flowing into the Persian Gulf.

For most of their course through Mesopotamia, the two rivers run through desert. There are no mountains downstream; they are far off to the north. This is to say, mountains are conspicuously absent from a good part of the Mesopotamian landscape. Yet, their presence is felt, carried south in the life-giving waters of the rivers that are born in them.

Mountains in Gilgamesh

Mountains figure prominently in the plot of the Epic of Gilgamesh. They are associated with wilderness and wild vitality — the opposite of the domesticating influence of the city — as well as with the dwelling place of the gods, with divine insight and revelation, and with being gateways into other realms.

“He Who Saw the Deep”

The very first words of the epic hint at mountains, or at least at the importance of verticality:

He who saw the Deep…²

Because Mesopotamian works were referred to by their opening words, “He Who Saw the Deep” may well have been what ancient readers called the poem — its title, in effect.

“The Deep” foreshadows what Gilgamesh will eventually encounter when he seeks out Uta-napishti, who lives in a land beyond a mountain and beyond a great body of water (more below). But “Deep” is a poetic rendering of the logogram IDIM (𒁁), which can mean “underground water” or the “source” and “headwaters” of a river.³ Since the headwaters of Mesopotamia’s two great rivers do originate in mountains, the etymology of “the Deep” is suggestive of a mountain environment. Though we must remember that not all rivers originate at altitude.

And yet I wonder whether the relationship is quite so straightforward. If “the Deep” names a physical place — the place where Uta-napishti lives — then to reach it Gilgamesh must first climb a mountain pass at Mount Mashu (more on this shortly), guarded by the Scorpion-people, and then cross a vast sea. To get there, in other words, one must cross a mountain gateway. But when Uta-napishti recounts how he won everlasting life, he says the god Enlil settled him at the “mouth of the rivers,”⁴ a location usually associated with sea level. A river’s mouth can be, after all, remarkably different than its source in terms of altitude.

As George comments in a footnote, “The Tigris and Euphrates were considered in antiquity to sink underground in the southern marshes and emerge again in the far east.”⁵ Thus it is perhaps best to read “the Deep” as a literal depth from source to sea and as a poetic figure for profundity and remoteness: some far-off, hidden realm beyond the ordinary order of things, beyond the known and civilized world. And this reading is supported by a recurring theme in Gilgamesh: a mountain acts as a gateway to the beyond or “the Deep.”

Mountains as Wilderness

Mountains, then, are a threshold between the world of civilization and the wilderness, the world of the unknown. They stand in contradistinction to cities, towns, and settled life — a distinction the epic reinforces again and again, and one that is built into the very languages of cuneiform.

Take the language first. There are several cuneiform logograms for “mountain” and “hill,” the main ones being KUR (𒆳), HUR.SAG (𒄯𒊕), and SA.TU (𒊓𒌅). Logograms often carry a cluster of related meanings depending on context, and these could also mean “territory,” “country,” “open country,” “desert,” or “foreign land.” That foreignness is best understood in relation to the urban centers of Mesopotamia itself: the mountain is a place without human civilization, literally and figuratively beyond the city. It is wilderness — a place outside or beyond.

The epic dramatizes this idea. Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu first roams the hills and mountains alongside the wild animals, until he is tamed and brought into civilization through the beauty and lovemaking of the priestess Shamhat — a scene that can be read as an early version of a much broader and remarkably durable trope, the idea of woman as the force that settles and domesticates the wild instincts of man. In Sophus Helle’s translation, Enkidu is the “child of the mountains”;⁶ Andrew George’s renders the same line more plainly, saying his “birth-place was the hills.”⁷ Compare Tablet II, where he is “born in the hills,” with an alternate version reading “born in the mountains.”⁸ His domestication and entry into the city of Uruk, fittingly, is described as “coming down from the mountains,” or, in George’s version, “coming from the uplands.”⁹

Enkidu’s alpine origins turn out to be useful. He becomes the guide who leads the pair toward the Cedar Forest to confront their foe, Humbaba. As a child of the mountains, Enkidu “knows the way to the Forest of Cedar… he shall throw open a path, make the mountains passable.”¹⁰ He is, in this sense, literature’s first Virgil, an experienced guide who leads a hero into an unknown realm. Our first Virgil, however, happens to be a wild man of the mountains, a mountaineer of sorts.

The Cedar Forest and Mountain Revelations

On a first reading, you might picture the Cedar Forest — the grove guarded by the enemy Humbaba — as flat woodland, a forest without topography. It isn’t until Tablet V that we definitively learn the forest is an alpine environment, the abundant dwelling place of the gods:

They stood marveling at the forest, gazing at the lofty cedars… They were gazing at the Cedar Mountain, the dwelling of the gods, the throne-dais of the goddesses… the cedar was proffering its abundance, sweet was its shade, full of delight.¹¹

One scholar notes that the idea of gods dwelling on a mountain is a foreign idea imported into southern Mesopotamia from the mountainous north west. W. G. Lambert remarks that the “pantheon residing on a mountain top” came to Mesopotamia via the Amorites.¹² In any case, even if the idea “is not indigenous to southern Mesopotamia,” the fact remains that by the late third millennium, the idea had taken hold across the region as several other Mesopotamian text reference this concept.

The cedar mountain is an abundant place, loud with birdsong, oozing the resins that were so prized for ceremonial incense and medicine.

What Gilgamesh does next is terrible and, frankly, baffling. After he and Enkidu kill Humbaba, Gilgamesh cuts down the cedars and deforests the holy mountain — the very mountain the gods had charged Humbaba with protecting. Even Enkidu seems unsettled by it. He asks:

In your might you slew the guardian — what was this wrath of yours, that you went trampling the forest?¹³

In any event, the approach to the Cedar Forest in the mountains is worth lingering on. Tablet IV follows Enkidu leading Gilgamesh toward the Cedar Forest, and near its opening the two “drew near to Mount Lebanon,”¹⁴ which the text identifies as the forest’s location. As they enter the mountain chain, much of the narrative is given over to the pair camping on mountain peaks, performing rituals and offerings, and praying that the mountains grant Gilgamesh visions:

Gilgamesh went up on to the top of the mountain, he made his offerings of flour to the hill. “O mountain, bring me a dream, let me see a favorable message from Shamash!” Enkidu made for him a house for the Dream God…¹⁵

This same sequence — climbing a mountain, making an offering, praying for a vision, and building a kind of dream-shelter to receive it — recurs at least five times across the tablet, each time producing a dream that the guide Enkidu then interprets.¹⁶

The Epic of Gilgamesh is thus one of the first works of literature — perhaps the first — to stage divine revelation and vision on a mountaintop. The pattern has had a long global afterlife, given how central mountain revelations would become to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Again, it is hard to say if mountain ideas like this one are native to southern Mesopotamia or imported via other peoples like the Amorites who live in the mountainous north west. But the idea clearly resonates throughout the region in early antiquity.

Gilgamesh Ventures Beyond the Mountains

The gods grow angry with Gilgamesh and Enkidu for what they have done, and condemn Enkidu to death. Gilgamesh grieves bitterly for his friend, and — now terrified of his own mortality — sets out to learn the secret of eternal life from Uta-napishti.

His road runs through the mountains. Gilgamesh travels to Mount Mashu, the twin-peaked mountains (two distinct mountains, some scholars believe) that guards the rising and setting of the sun. Mashu is the gate of sunrise, watched over by the Scorpion-people, who regard Gilgamesh favorably for having mastered the the rivers and mountain passes to reach them. As one of them marvels, “never did anyone travel the path of the mountain.”¹⁷ They let him pass:

Go, Gilgamesh! May the mountains of Mashu allow you to pass! May the mountains and hills watch over your going… May the gate of the mountain open before you!¹⁸

Gilgamesh crosses Mashu, travels through a stretch of total darkness, and emerges in an abundant place beside a sea, where a boatman ferries him across to a distant land. There, in a place the epic barely describes, he finds Uta-napishti and asks him about eternal life. Uta-napishti answers with a story.

It is an early flood myth, and its parallels with the account in Genesis are unmistakable. The gods resolve to flood the earth, but one of them tips off Uta-napishti, who builds a boat and loads it with the “seed of all living creatures.”¹⁹ As in the biblical version, the boat comes to rest on a mountain — here, Mount Nimush in present-day Iraqi Kurdistan.²⁰ Like Noah, Uta-napishti releases a bird; when it fails to return, he understands that the waters have receded and dry land has reappeared. And so, on the mountain, he performs a ceremony:

I brought out an offering and sacrificed to the four corners of the earth, I strewed incense on the oak of the mountain.²¹

For a comparative account of ancient Mesopotamia’s influence on Judeo-Christian ideas, see Richard E. Averbeck, “Sumer, the Bible, and Comparative Method: Historiography and Temple Building” in Mark W. Chavalas and K. Lawson Younger (eds.), Mesopotamia and the Bible: Comparative Explorations (Grand Rapids, MI.: Baker, 2002), 88-125. ↩︎
“The Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš,” Tablet I, line 1, electronic Babylonian Library (eBL), translated by Andrew George, https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/1/4 (accessed June 30, 2026). Unless otherwise noted, line references throughout follow the standard tablet-and-line numbering used in this edition. ↩︎
See the entry for nagbu I in the electronic Babylonian Library dictionary: https://www.ebl.lmu.de/tools/dictionary/nagbu%20I. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet XI, lines 205–206. ↩︎
A.R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, Vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 864. ↩︎
Sophus Helle, trans., Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), Tablet I, line 172. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet I, line 172. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet II, line 42. ↩︎
Helle, Tablet I, line 243; eBL, Tablet I, line 241. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet III, lines 78–79. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet V, lines 1–9. ↩︎
W.G. Lambert, “Interchange of Ideas Between Southern Mesopotamia and Syria-Palestine as Seen in Literature,” in H.J. Nissen and J. Renger (eds.), Mesopotamien und seine Nachbarn (CRRA 25) (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1982), 314. See also George, The Standard Babylonian Epic, Vol. I, 466. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet V, lines 305–306. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet IV, line 4. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet IV. ↩︎
This calls to mind Native American sweat lodges and vision quests held on mountains, a few of which I encountered on Bear Butte and in the surrounding area in South Dakota. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet IX, line 81. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet IX, lines 131–135. ↩︎
eBL, Tablet XI, line 27. ↩︎
A.R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 516. Here George notes that the Hebrew phrase in Genesis 8:4 concerning where Noah’s boat comes to rest “means ‘on the mountains of Urartu’ (i.e. northern Kurdistan), not, anachronistically, ‘on Mt Ararat.’” ↩︎
eBL, Tablet XI, lines 157–158. ↩︎

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[Genius Loci] Offices, Rooms, Backrooms

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

I write you from the comfort of my new home office, a room I’ve renovated with my own two hands, a room that I’ve unintentionally been calling a “study” and a “studio.” I don’t know why I reach for these words instead of “office,” but I like to tell myself it is because I see it as a place where a certain kind of intellectual and creative work occurs, a place of dreaming as much as doing.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that the intimate spaces we inhabit like bedrooms and offices are charged, imaginative spaces that shape our thinking. Any space we live in “bears the essence of the notion of home,” and the chief function of the home is that it “shelters daydreaming,” “protects the dreamer,” and “allows one to dream in peace.” How a space earns that power is an essay I’m thinking about writing. But as I renovated this space, a few questions kept turning around in my head. When does an “office” become a “study” or a “studio”? Are there real distinctions we should be careful about when we use these words? Or is it just a pretense?

My study (ahem) still has all the hallmarks of a newly-moved-into space: unadorned walls, books and random items strewn about, the lingering scent of fresh paint and drywall dust. With enough time, most of these hallmarks will give way to more mature signs of life, to evidence of an inhabited place. As for now, I’m just happy to finally sit in a space I built myself to do The Work.

The early days of demolition.

Renovation Reflections

Before some random room can become a place, it has to be project. And this one nearly broke me. I did very little reading (see below) and writing. The renovation took longer than I had planned (what doesn’t take longer than planned?). I had hoped to be done by the end of May and working in the room come June 1, but the demo/renovation was harder than I expected. Holding a panel of 5/8” drywall up against the ceiling with one hand while screwing it in with another was something I hadn’t imagined doing at the outset. How does one person do this? Using a makeshift frame that I built from scrap lumber (I named it “Nate” after my neighbor who failed to show up and help me one day), I was able to muscle a few panels of drywall into place and screw them in. Even with “Nate” helping me, it was hard work. The real Nate eventually showed up, thankfully, but the work was no easier… just faster.

The room is not done, technically. I had dreamed of hanging wallpaper and wainscoting, of laying a faux-wood flooring, but that would have delayed my move-in date even further (to say nothing of adding to an already ballooning expense). Instead, I painted the walls using leftover paint (a shade of white called “Jasmine Flower”), slapped down a cheap rug I found at an outlet store, and called it a wrap.

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

It’s been at least a couple decades since I’ve read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I came back to it, this time in audiobook form, as I renovated my own room. Originally a series of lectures given in 1928, the little book is worth a read no less because it’s a classic in feminist thought. It examines how women have been systemically (socially? culturally?) limited from participating in creative fields. Woolf makes the case that a woman needs financial independence and space, both physical and metaphorical, to do any kind of serious intellectual or creative work.

I understand the importance for women to have a room of their own, so-to-speak, especially considering their historical deprivation of it. But I also found Woolf’s premise generally holds for… everyone? Financial independence, whether that be from a man, an alienating day job, a master, an oppressive society, etc. ensures that one has the time and resources one needs to think and create. Having a dedicated, quiet space ensures that one can be comfortable to think freely and create without interruptions or external demands. When we quote Woolf’s famous line “a room of one’s own,” we often omit the second half of the sentence: “with a lock on the door.” One needs to be protected — physically, financially, metaphorically — from distractions that take one away from The Work.

I put a deadbolt on the door I hung, with the help of my father. This puzzled my wife. With a smile, I told her it is to protect my books from thieves. I don’t ever expect to lock myself in the room while I work, but doing so might be a helpful ritual or symbol.

There are many well-known examples where beautiful work has been created without spatial and financial luxuries. And, conversely, there are many well-known examples of luxuries and comforts killing creativity. But I believe Woolf’s general premise to be a good one in creating the general conditions for creative output.

Remnants of insulation.

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi

At the end of the semester, a friend let me borrow Susanna Clarke’s 2020 novel Piranesi. She mentioned it was an easy read and that I’d be interested in it given my interests in journaling and note-taking. The story uses short journal entries written by the protagonist as the narrative device, whose brevity I’ve found helpful while reading at night and before bed.

The book — at least the first half — might be the book one looks to when studying “atmospheric” writing. The titular character, Piranesi, lives in a labyrinthine structure called “the House.” The House is endless. It has statues. Tides regularly flood rooms in the House. Only one other person lives in the House. There are birds too, and a few skeletons. That’s about it. It is incredible how much sense of place and atmosphere the author is able to conjure with so little. It is positively weird.

The book reveals itself to be a psychological thriller, maybe, or a work of pseudo-science fiction. I enjoyed the book, and especially Piranesi’s optimism, his journalistic spirit, and his ability to find beauty in an otherwise bleak, isolated space.

Backrooms (film)

I went to the cinema for the first time in three years and saw Backrooms, a psychological thriller/horror film. What drew me to the film was its showtime and its competition. I had a narrow window to watch a movie and it was either Backrooms or The Devil Wears Prada 2. It was an easy pick. I didn’t know much about the film, or its context, prior to watching it. But I’m glad I did.

The movie is a psychological thriller set in a liminal space, or a “non-place” as Marc Augé might call it. I won’t spoil the film for you, but the plot involves a furniture store owner finding a portal into an endless labyrinth, an eerie abandoned office building with early 1990s wallpaper, ceiling tiles, and fluorescent lighting. The early-’90s vibes are spot on, which is all the more impressive when we remember its creator Kane Parsons is so young he cannot even buy alcohol in the USA (per Wikipedia, he was born in 2005 and turns 21 on June 18).

Parsons’s work was “discovered” through his YouTube channel. I love stories like this one, which illustrate the power and importance of sharing your work online or with others in your field. His work is exceptional, it should be noted. Even his YouTube work exhibits a quality above and beyond those in his peer group. And there is a little luck involved. For every one Kane Parsons there is an entire swarm of other creative minds who get lost in the multitude. But you can’t make the basket if you don’t take a shot at it.

I’d be remiss not to mention that Backrooms has some interesting overlap with Piranesi: the labyrinth, the portal into the space, the relationship the space has with memory, the psychological and sci-fi elements, the sense-of-place being constructed with so little. They pair nicely together.

Drywall taped and mudded.

I sign off from a backroom of my own, this one small and safe and bolted from the inside, where I now turn my attention to The Work. I’m naming this space The Beehive as a metaphor for work and a kind of teeming energy.

Today — right now — is the first time I’ve been able to sit and work in this place. I don’t have all my items moved in and organized yet. But things will fall into place.

I leave you with some points I need to remember before embarking on any future renovation project. Maybe they’ll help you too:

Consider hiring someone else to do the work.
Demolition is just as difficult and transformative as building.
However long you think it will take to complete your project, multiply that figure by 2.
However much you think it will cost to complete your project, multiply that figure by 2.
You can learn how to do most things yourself.
But you’re not a pro, so don’t expect professional results (drywall mud, I’m looking at you).
Also but, you’re competent and able-bodied, and you can deliver results that are good enough.
If your father offers to help you (if anyone offers to help you really, but especially if your father does), don’t hesitate. Always say “yes.”
See point 1.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

Drywall sanded (yes, I wore a mask).

Wonky iPhone photo, but nearly done!

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[Genius Loci] Summer Break, Renovations, A. G. Sertillanges, The Work Begins

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

Greetings from the far side of the academic year. It is officially summer break, which checks out. The past few days in Florida have seen near-record heat. Thankfully the humidity has been relatively low, and rain is coming in the next few days to cool things down. I feel free, but also a little lost, like a man standing in the middle of a forest unsure about where to go. But it is more an anxious-excitement lost than a scared lost. There are too many options and possibilities.

I know I complain a lot about how little time I have during the academic year to devote to The Work. But scheduling my out-of-office auto-responder to end on 18 August 2026 has made me forget about the toxins that leach into academia, the so-called “service to the college” and “other duties as assigned." These noxious elements are properly alienating for the professoriat. They take us away from our primary roles: serving students, doing research, writing. And it makes increasingly less sense if and when an school’s administration and local government do what they want anyway. Anyway, enough of this for the next three and a half months.

Three and a half months!

This time will be a kind of detox. I’m ready to get to work, to focus on The Work. You know what I mean. This summer is about making space. Clearing the academic residue out of my system. Pulling sheetrock from the walls of a garage room. Rereading my book proposal with honest eyes and reworking it with careful hands. All of it, making literal and figurative space to do one’s work, is the same project.

New Essay: A Higher Calling

I published a new essay called “A Higher Calling? Where Our Creative Impulse Comes From” last month about the ways in which creative people have described their “vocation” or “calling” — that feeling some of us have of being driven or compelled to pursue our work. Some describe this impulse as coming from a higher power. Others, it is a kind of internal impulse.

The essay is an essay in the proper sense of the term: a test, an attempt to examine ideas and figure out what I think about a topic. I’m happy with it, not least because I learned something while writing it. Specifically, that what I had always felt as my “calling” has a long history entangled in religious and spiritual thinking. And this is a powerful motivational force for work.

“The Intellectual Life”

My essay “A Higher Calling?” was inspired by a book I read: A. G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life (amazon|bookshop).

In his book, Sertillanges calls intellectual work a “vocation” and thought of it as a literal calling from god. He also offers a vision of what intellectual practice looks like. His vision is a Catholic one, rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Considering its foundation is set in medieval Christian thinking, the book can feel dated. For one, Sertillanges speaks of the intellectual as a man’s occupation, whose wife must acknowledge her husband’s sacred call.

Leibniz reportedly said, “there is no book so bad that you could not get something out of it.” Sertillanges himself suggests something similar: intellectuals must look for what is true and useful in all works, even flawed ones. He asks us not to “linger endlessly over differences” when we read, but to focus instead on what serves our projects and mission. It is as if Sertillanges has given us permission to salvage his text for its useful parts — or, as Thomas Jefferson once described the moral teachings of Jesus, to find the “diamonds on a dunghill.”

I don’t mean to imply Sertillanges’s book is a dunghill. But some parts shine more brightly than others. Among them: a framework for living the so-called “life of the mind,” and a discussion of the necessary sacrifices one must make to live this kind of life to its fullest. If rigor and dedication are central to this lifestyle, readers of The Intellectual Life might be surprised to find Sertillanges also advocating for balance, moderation, and play.

His advice is generally good, not just for intellectual life, but for any kind of dedicated, rigorous living. The book is less a practical guide to researching, studying, writing, or publishing than it is a guide to the kind of devotion required to live this life fully, without abandoning the world, your family, or your friends. Being an intellectual, Sertillanges argues, is not a career one stumbles walk into. It is a lifestyle, a way of living in and seeing the world. His advice is generally good, not just for intellectual life, but for any kind of dedicated, rigorous living. The book is less a practical guide to researching, studying, writing, or publishing than it is a guide to the kind of devotion required to live this life fully, without abandoning the world, your family, or your friends. Being an intellectual, Sertillanges argues, is not a career one stumbles into. It is a lifestyle, a way of living in and seeing the world, that one consciously adopts.

The study with a pile of drywall.

Study / Studio Remodel

Since Luciano came into our lives, our house feels smaller. What was an office became Luciano’s bedroom. What was a dedicated guest room became a multipurpose room: office, guest room, storage. Books are everywhere. Battery chargers. Old cameras and rolls of developed film ready to be cut and archived. Stacks of mail I thought I’d get to. My desk has become its own episode of Hoarders. It isn’t comfortable for our friends or family when they visit, though they’re too gracious to complain. And it isn’t a comfortable place to get work done, to retreat in quiet comfort.

There is a small room in the back of our garage. At 12 x 6 feet (roughly 4 x 2 meters), it is half the size of a small bedroom. When we were viewing this home, the realtor joked that it would make a good “man cave.” It is that kind of space, detached and private. The room is unfinished. It has poorly hung drywall barely painted white, no insulation in the walls or ceiling, no door, no electricity within the room itself. Its window is a single-pane antique. The room is usually a sauna.

I am going to renovate the space into a proper study and studio. To do this, I’ll need to pull down all the sheetrock from the walls and ceiling, rip off the furring strips and drywall screws, run electricity, insulate, hang new drywall, install a door, install a new window, add flooring, and so on.

I’ve never done anything like this before.

There is no going back. I’ve already started renovating it. In the past week, I have completely gutted the room, stripping it down to the bare block wall. I punched out the old window and hung a new one. I installed new outlet boxes — as it turned out, the room was already wired on an unmarked 20-amp circuit. And oer the next few weeks, I’ll finish the job… hopefully.

The goal isn’t to make an Instagrammable workspace in line with my “dark academia” predilections. The goal is to get a functional, comfortable space into operational condition as soon as possible.

Book Proposal

The workspace matters for my summer work plans and my work On Mountains. My larger goal is to get the book proposal into good enough shape to solicit feedback from friends and mentors, so I can begin querying agents later this year. I’ve already written a solid draft, so I’m not starting with a blank canvas. But I need to get clear and honest about the book’s angle and boundaries given my current work and life conditions. I have two possible paths: one more appealing, the other more realistic and less costly in time and resources. One version of the book is the book I want to write. The other is the book I might actually be able to finish given my current constraints. I’m trying to figure out if those are the same book.

This process will also necessitate creating an outline, which sets a clear path on where to go and what paths to ignore. Having this constraint will be helpful for creative clarity.

The proposal, like my new study, isn’t finished. But the summer has started, and that’s enough to get excited about… On that note, I’m off to enjoy a birthday snack.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

Happy(?) birthday selfie after installing a window.

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[Fieldnotes] A Higher Calling? Where Our Creative Impulse Comes From

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Why was Socrates sentenced to death? Ask any reasonably educated person why Socrates drank the hemlock, and they might respond: “corrupting the youth.” In reality, corrupting the youth was one of a pair of charges and stemmed from the more seditious charge of impiety. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates defended himself against the allegation of godlessness by calling his work an “obligation” or a “duty” that had been “enjoined” or “imposed” on him by “god, by means of oracles and dreams, and in every other way that a divine manifestation has ever ordered a man to do anything.”¹ It was this very admission of divine guidance that upset the Athenian authorities in the first place, a notion that “caused him to be accused of introducing ‘new spiritual beings’ or divinities and of disbelieving in the gods of the state.”² Socrates said he was commanded by god to pursue philosophy, which suggests he felt a divine, mystical, or supernatural inspiration to pursue his life’s work. “God gave me a station,” Socrates said, “with orders to spend my life in philosophy.”³

Why do some people feel compelled to devote their lives to study or to art? When we say we feel a “higher calling,” what do we mean? As it turns out, humans have been trying to answer these questions for over two thousand years.

To be “inspired” originally meant to be “breathed into” by some divine influence, much like the word “enthusiasm” meant to be “possessed by a god.” For the Greeks, the supernatural-like force that inspired men was sometimes called daimon (δαίμων), the root of the modern word for another force that possesses us: demon. For the Romans, the guiding, protective force was called a genius. There is a longstanding mystical or spiritual element to this feeling, which helps us understand why the Greek daimon and the Latin genius are often translated into English as “spirit.”

This also helps us understand why, now, in the 21st century, those in intellectual and creative fields continue to describe the urge to do their work in similar, otherworldly terms. In his 2023 book The Creative Act, the legendary music producer Rick Rubin suggests the creative impulse comes from an external source emanating from the “universe.” He called the source of the impulse “the Source.” The Source is something we need to tune into using our “antennae,” a metaphor Rubin uses to refer to our receptive sensibilities and creative intuitions. “We are all translators,” Rubin writes, “for messages the universe is broadcasting.”⁴

Rick Rubin

But Rubin’s idea is a modern rendition of an old standard, whose echoes emanate from the songs of the Homeric age. His cosmic Source is the modern equivalent of the Muse who sings into his book’s target audience, the creative ancestor of the Greek bard.⁵

It is as if an artist is a kind of medium, prophet, or seer, less a maker than a receiver. Less a genius than possessed by one. Less a storm than a lightning rod. This is the take of Elizabeth Gilbert who, in her 2016 bestseller Big Magic, writes that ideas exist out there in the ether and it is our jobs as artists to acknowledge the idea’s call to express itself through us. “The universe,” Gilbert writes, “buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.”⁶ If we can’t find the jewel, the universe will find someone else who can.

Socrates was critical of this idea two thousand years ago, and especially of poets for their “inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.”⁷ Socrates seems to be signalling a difference between those who feel commanded by a god to pursue a path and those who are are simply puppeteered by one. We need to be active agents in our calling.

In the first of several letters sent to a young, aspiring writer, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised him to stop searching for external validation and, instead, to consider if his urge to write came from a deeper, internal impulse.⁸ Rilke said:

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

As Socrates alluded to in his own life, Rilke recommends that the young poet surrender to the call, organizing his life around this pursuit. Unlike Socrates, Rilke’s impulse is an internal, human drive; it doesn’t come from god. Two theories, then, about the same feeling that come to the same conclusions. Yet where they locate the sources of their drives couldn’t be any more different.

Does the source of our creative impulse even matter? I’m not sure it does, for they all take us to the same place. We pursue our work at great personal sacrifice. We dedicate ourselves to our work with zeal. We recklessly pursue something that promises little, if anything at all, except for the nebulous suggestion that it makes life worth living.

Rainer Maria Rilke

As it turns out, modern psychology gives us insight into the power of our motivations and drives.

In 1971, the psychologist Edward Deci performed a series of experiments hoping to gain insight into the power of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.⁹ The experiment involved college students and Soma cubes, a puzzle where one assembles Tetris-like shapes into various three-dimensional forms. The students all noted that they liked solving puzzles and were split into two groups. Students in one group were paid if they successfully made forms from the Soma cubes. Students in the other group were not paid. When researchers left the room with a pre-established excuse, they watched on and found that students who were not paid to solve the puzzles continued playing with Soma cubes at a significantly higher rate than students who were paid. Deci concluded that external motivations can compromise, corrupt, or undermine the power of intrinsic motivations. Interestingly, he also found that the students who were not paid actually performed better at assembling forms with the Soma cubes. As Deci wrote in a paper co-authored with psychologist Richard Ryan, “intrinsic motivation [is] the prototypic manifestation of the human tendency towards learning and creativity.”¹⁰

But Deci and his colleagues also learned that intrinsic motivation is not just helpful in work. It is important in cultivating autonomy and a sense of meaning or purpose in life. They found that people whose motivation is authentic and self-authored exhibit stronger performance and creativity, as well as “heightened vitality, self-esteem, and general well-being.”¹¹ In short, those who feel driven to pursue their work do measurably better work and feel better for it. They are not, Deci and his colleagues write, “among the millions who, for hours a day, sit passively before their televisions, stare blankly from the back of their classrooms, or wait listlessly for the weekend as they go about their jobs.”¹²

This is what Socrates was circling around two thousand years before psychology caught up. Far from a sacrifice, surrendering to the work we feel driven to is one of the more reliable paths to a life that feels worth living.

Alysa Liu

The superiority of internal motivation makes sense. Work that we like to do without external pressure is often done with more enthusiasm and joy. Indeed, it is often work that we excel at.

At least this is what has been suggested in the recent discourse surrounding Alysa Liu, the American athlete who, after retiring from figure skating as a teenager, returned to win two gold medals at the 2026 Olympics barely into her twenties.¹³ Liu retried from the sport because of the external demands it placed on her. But, after freeing herself from these external pressures, rekindled her love with the sport. “Winning and losing don’t affect me anymore,” Liu said, adding, “I feel pretty indifferent about placements. Medaling doesn’t fulfill me. I skate because I like to skate.”¹⁴

As Liu might attest, work that we feel obligated or forced to do is often done begrudgingly. It is work that doesn’t “fulfill” us. It might put food on our tables, but that doesn’t nourish our souls. It is work that acts as a means to an end, work done to provide material comfort often at the expense of work that offers inner well-being or a sense of purpose.

To those who work begrudgingly, we hurl that old chestnut: “their heart is not in it.” If the spirit is a good metaphor for an external drive to create, the heart might be a good one for our inner drive because it locates the impulse in the organ that literally pulses. The heart is what keeps us alive, the metaphor suggests. Perhaps this is why Rilke asked the young poet if he felt his internal drive in his heart. The heart gives us courage and pushes us, “in the most silent hours of the night,” to endure. Meaningful work demands that we pour our hearts into it.

The heart is related to another term that describes this internal feeling: “passion.” To be passionate literally means “to suffer,” and to have compassion for someone suggests that you’re suffering alongside them. Suffering for one’s work is a good metaphor, for many who dedicate their lives to their passions, Socrates among them, a kind of suffering follows. Socrates claimed that he was in “vast poverty on account of my service to the god.”¹⁵

St. Augustin by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645

In his 1921 book The Intellectual Life, the French philosopher Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges called intellectual work a “vocation” and thought of it as a literal calling from god. He believed that being called by god to pursue the life of the mind is to be drafted into a spiritual selective service. “You are,” Sertillanges addressed the would-be intellectual, “consecrated by your vocation.”¹⁶ The thinking man is thus akin to an apostle chosen by god. Not unlike Matthew, whom Jesus lured away from the lucrative, if stigmatized life of a tax collector and into an uncertain, itinerant life, the intellectual is called on by god to surrender himself to a new lifestyle in His image and in pursuit of truth.

Yet Sertillanges seems to suggest the calling can come from within or from without. On the one hand, “it is written in our instincts, in our powers, in a sort of inner impulse of which reason must judge.” On the other hand, “a vocation is something that cannot be had for the asking. It comes from heaven and from our first nature. The whole point is to be docile to God and to oneself as soon as they have spoken."¹⁷ If the creative impulse comes from an internal or external source, Sertillanges asks us to surrender our lives to it.

The supernatural source of our creative impulse is an enchanting metaphor: a higher power calls upon an unsuspecting mortal to surrender their life in pursuit of the divine act of creation. While some of us might resist the supernatural framing of the creative impulse, I wonder if it is powerful because it offers a two-for-one deal, giving us both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. An external power orders us to work, but surrendering to this “higher calling” and believing it to be our “life’s mission” is intrinsically motivating.

Feeling driven or “called” gives our work energy and resonance, casting it into a higher orbit where it buzzes like a charged particle. This is why we can feel duty-bound to our work so strongly that it becomes our life’s mission. The call separates the good work from lower forms of work, propelling it into a loftier realm where it feels, if not sacred, then at least serious.

Whether it is of god, the universe, or human nature, the fact remains that some of us feel driven to pursue our work. Perhaps this feeling is not a supernatural feeling at all, but rather a deeply human one. Whatever the source of our impulse, we should feel a deep sense of kinship with those who feel one. There is something inspiring about those who dedicate their lives to pursue some vocation, to surrender themselves to some creative work and, if need be, to drink the hemlock for it.

Plato’s Apology. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Paragraph 33c. ↩︎
Lamb, Walter Rangeley Maitland, and Bury, Robert Gregg. Plato: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. United Kingdom: Heinemann, 1928. Page 66; See also Darrin McMahon. Divine Fury. Page 6. ↩︎
Ibid. Page 107. Paragraph 29. τοῦ δὲ θεοῦ τάττοντος, ὡς ἐγὼ ᾠήθην τε καὶ ὑπέλαβον, φιλοσοφοῦντά με δεῖν ζῆν καὶ ἐξετάζοντα ἐμαυτὸν καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους, ἐνταῦθα δὲ φοβηθεὶς ἢ θάνατον ἢ ἄλλο ὁτιοῦν πρᾶγμα λίποιμι τὴν τάξιν. ↩︎
Rick Rubin. The Creative Act. Page 7. ↩︎
See the opening lines of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey. ↩︎
Elizabeth Gilbert. Big Magic. 2016. ↩︎
Lamb, Walter Rangeley Maitland, and Bury, Robert Gregg. Plato: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. United Kingdom: Heinemann, 1928. ↩︎
Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters to a Young Poet. ↩︎
Edward L. Deci. Effects of Externally Mediated Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. April 1971. ↩︎
Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist. January 2000. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Kelly Chen. Intrinsic Motivation Helped Alysa Liu Win Gold. Psychology Today. ↩︎
Lisa Costantini. Alysa Liu is Finally Staking on Her Own Terms. 2026. ↩︎
Lamb, Walter Rangeley Maitland, and Bury, Robert Gregg. Plato: Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. United Kingdom: Heinemann, 1928. Page 89. ↩︎
A. G. Sertillanges. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. Page 6. ↩︎
Ibid. 4. ↩︎

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[Genius Loci] Between the Lamp and the Sun

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

I skipped last month’s newsletter. And even as I type these words, I’m tempted to skip this month’s too. I find myself pursued by the writer’s oldest adversary, that self-destructive feeling that one has nothing to write about. I use the word “feeling” here deliberately because that’s what it is. It is an emotional response not grounded in any reality, at least not for me.

Sometimes this feeling is wrapped in shame and avoidance. It is better to remain silent than to confront the fact that I didn’t accomplish as much as I wanted to accomplish. This becomes especially destructive when we rationalize the shame away. Besides, nobody wants to hear about minor progress anyway. Other times, this feeling is wrapped in self-doubt. I have nothing worthy to say. I have no new insight to provide. I have nothing to contribute. Nobody cares about what I have to say. Nobody wants to hear from me, of all people.

Yet, as is often the case, our feelings are contradicted by reality.

In fact, when I think about it, the past few months were especially full and busy. They were full and busy in the positive sense. I read several books related to my research, and a few for pleasure. I wrote thousands of words, some of which appeared on an On Mountains post about mountains in the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I edited and published a documentary about a Bolivian pilgrimage to a sacred mountain on YouTube, which consumed no small portion of my time. And I spent a great deal of time thinking.

And life was also positively full and busy domestically. My mother came to visit from abroad, I painted the house during my spring “break,” my son had his second birthday, and our family has been riding bicycles in the evenings after dinner.

In short, the past few months have opened many doors, they have provided many opportunities to reflect upon and to write about.

And yet, if what I felt was just an illusory feeling, that’s not to say that the feeling wasn’t justified. The fullness crowded out the time and space to dedicate to reflecting, synthesizing, and creating.

Maybe we can have days that are too full and busy in a positive sense. Which is to say, to be full and busy in a positive sense is still to be full and busy. It is like you’ve eaten too much kale and broccoli: while nutritious, the fact remains that you’ve eaten too much. You’ve become immobilized. You haven’t left space for anything else. Your portions are not balanced.

What would balancing our daily portions of life and creativity look like? How many hours should one dedicate each day to playing, resting, living, experiencing, consuming, reflecting, synthesizing, and actually creating? Should we even expect ourselves to dedicate a part of our day to reflection and creation much like we expect to drink water or to eat a certain amount of protein or fiber? What would we place at the foundation of our creative pyramid? What would we place at its apex?

The foundation of a Pyramid of Creative Work might be sleep, rest, play, and movement. Above that, consuming, reading, researching sits below reflecting, journaling, and making connections. At the apex of the pyramid might be the product, the creative output.

The Creative Pyramid, generated using artificial intelligence.

The creator needs to have a balanced life and existence.

In his book The Intellectual Life, the French Catholic thinker Anton-Gilbert Sertillanges recommended what we might today call a healthy “work-life balance” to those interested in living a life of the mind. “Give up nothing of what belongs to man,” he wrote implying that even the thinker, the intellectual, the philosopher must not lose touch with what it means to be human. We must live in the world. We must seek rest and joy. Work should not come at the expense of one’s life.

The man who thinks exclusively of his work, works badly: he cramps himself; he acquires a specialized bent which becomes a defect. The mind must stay open, must keep contact with humanity and with the world, so that every time it comes back to its work, it brings capacity for a new flight.

Conversely, for Sertillanges, life should not come at the expense of one’s work. Those who are called to do intellectual or creative work must ensure there is space for the work.

But the takeaway here is appreciating the beautiful duet between work and rest. It is understanding that rest, play, or life is an important, generative part of creative work. Rest doesn’t serve one’s work any more work serves one’s rest. They are mutual dependencies.

Before you call me a “twat” for treating family time as something less than a life well-lived, please know that I am also stalked by another adversary. The work I’ve been called to do has a shadow that grows longer and longer. It is a feeling of never having enough time. The sun is falling towards the horizon.

Unless I am doing The Work, unless I can dedicate time and space to The Work, unless I can embody The Work, I feel as if I am wasting what little life I have left. I know this sounds ridiculous, pretentious, and unhealthy, but it is a feeling I haven’t been able to shake.

That which pulls us away from ourselves can be beautiful and rich and full. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset had a word for this: alteración — the state of being pulled outside of oneself, absorbed by the world. What can pull us away are distractions like painting the house and algorithmic media, but they can beautiful things like birthday cakes and bicycle rides. What makes a human, says Ortega y Gasset, is our power of “withdrawing himself from the world and taking his stand inside himself.” The word he used for this superpower is ensimismarse — the state of being inside oneself. Ortega y Gasset suggests that if we never withdraw into ourselves, we’re nothing but sub-human primates always and forever reacting to environmental stimuli.¹

Luciano in the park next to his father's shadow.

I should say here that, between the birthday cakes and bike rides, I have been writing. But my writing hasn’t been public-facing, which is a specific kind of writing. Note-taking and journaling are different than, say, writing a public-facing piece meant to be read by others. Public-facing writing needs to provide some value, whether it is information, inspiration, or entertainment. Put another way, public-facing writing serves others, while note-taking and journaling are self-serving.

Self-serving work supports a person’s humanity as much as it supports the work one does, as we see in the Pyramid of Creative Work. This type of writing is writing to think, as opposed to public-facing writing which is writing to communicate.

When we don’t produce public-facing work, which we have defined as work that provides value, many of us today feel as if we are not producing anything of value. This is a life-threatening disease we need to treat. The self-serving work, the note-taking and journaling and thinking and reflecting and resting and playing, is valuable. It is an important part of The Work.

The French poet Paul Valéry spent many decades writing in his notebooks between 5 am and 8 am, the time “between the lamp and the sun.” He thought his notebooks to be his most important intellectual output. While his notebooks have now been published and even translated into English, Valéry treated them a kind of private laboratory — a private space in which to think, to experiment, to test, to tinker.

I’ve been tinkering in my own laboratory these past few months. Between the birthday cakes and bicycle rides, between the video editing and this blinking cursor, I have also been thinking and jotting and researching. These form the foundation of the Creative Pyramid — the unglamorous, unreadable, unshared work that makes everything above it possible.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

Ortega y Gasset, José. Man and People. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Norton, 1963. Pp 16-18. ↩︎

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[On Mountains] Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña — A Documentary About Faith

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Just a quick post to say that I recently published a documentary film about the unique blend of Catholic and pre-Columbian religious practices during the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña in Quillacollo, Bolivia.

I’ve written about the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña before, and about the relationship between Urkupiña and political power in Bolivia.

But this documentary lets you experience what it is actually like to be there.

It might feel vloggy at times, but through interviews with local pilgrims, shamans, and vendors, I’ve tried to make something more meaningful than just a travel vlog.

I hope you enjoy it and learn something.

And please pardon my surprised “YouTube face,” which was done for the algorithm. Cheers.

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[On Mountains] Our Lady of Guadalupe's Mountain: Tepeyac Hill

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 07:00:00 -0400

The Virgin of Guadalupe might be the most famous image to come out of Mexico, and no other Christian site worldwide receives more visitors than her hilltop shrine in Mexico City: the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. With an estimated 20 million visitors annually, the number of pilgrims visiting her basilica is four to five times greater than those visiting the Vatican. Yet beneath the prostrations and genuflections of the 20 million pilgrims who visit her shrine is Tepeyac Hill, a small but prominent hill that is central to understanding Mary’s apparition within Spain’s political and religious conquest of the New World.

A Mountain and a Vision

In early December 1531, Juan Diego, a recent Nahua convert to Christianity, was walking from his home in Cuauhtitlan to Tlatelolco to continue his religious instruction. Tlatelolco occupied the northern half of the island it shared with Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that was connected to the mainland by a series of causeways. The path skirted around a small but conspicuous hill called Tepeyac, which stood at the end of the causeway on the mainland side of the lake.

As Juan Diego passed the hill, an extraordinary, heavenly birdsong emanating from its summit stopped him in his tracks. Looking up, he saw a radiant woman who beckoned him to ascend. The woman, who shone with a beauty and vitality that transformed the barren, rocky hillside into a lush, flowering paradise, spoke to Juan Diego in Nahuatl and presented herself as the Mother of God. She instructed him to go to the local bishop and ask that a “house” be built for her on the summit of the hill.

Juan Diego went to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga with Mary’s request, but the bishop was unmoved. Juan Diego returned to Tepeyac Hill to tell Mary that the bishop required a sign. Mary directed him back to the top of the hill, where he would find that one: flowers. Juan Diego was astonished not only because these flowers were growing out of season in December, but because they were growing at all on that craggy, barren, dusty hill. He gathered them into his cloak and carried them to the bishop.

When Juan Diego opened his cloak before Bishop Zumárraga, the flowers fell out of his cape. There, imprinted on the inside of his cloak, was the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe as we know it today. It was the sign the bishop needed. Zumárraga ordered a shrine built on Tepeyac Hill without delay.¹

https://www.loc.gov/item/2021668313/

The 1550 Uppsala Map of Tenochtitlan Showing Tepeyac. West-up map orientation.

The Glyphs in the Virgin’s Gown

Much has been written about the image of Mary that appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak. But one element of the image that has drawn particular attention from historians is the pattern of flowers on the Virgin’s gown, some of which appear to echo the Nahua glyphs for mountain and water.

The Nahua glyph for mountain (tepetl) takes a bell-like form, often with rounded, knuckle-like protrusions along its sides. The glyph for water (atl) is recognizable by its sinuous, turquoise bands threaded with darker lines suggestive of currents.

Detail of a flower on Our Lady of Guadalupe's dress. There are eight such flowers.

From The Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs

Nahua Glyphs. Top row tepetl-mountain. Bottom row atl-water.

I was skeptical of the relationship between these Nahua glyphs and the flowers on Guadalupe’s dress at first. But the more I researched the topic, the more connections I found.

If the flower on Guadalupe’s dress alludes to the Nahua glyphs for water (atl) and mountain (tepetl), it also makes an allusion to the social and political organization of the Nahua people. Together, atl and tepetl form the compound word altepetl, the Nahuatl term and idea signifying a community of people or a place much like the English word “nation” or the Spanish word “pueblo” do. That mountains and water together gave the Nahuatl-speaking civilization its socio-political organizing principle speaks to how deeply embedded these two elements were in the culture’s sense of identity and place.

From the Codex Osuna, 1565, page 34

Glyphs representing Texcoco, Tenochtitlan, and Tlacopan, the three primary altepetl of the Aztec Empire.

The water-mountain pairing carries additional significance in the Guadalupe story itself. Mary requests her temple on the summit of Tepeyac Hill, and Sánchez reports a natural spring bubbled at its foot.²

Tepeyac Hill

Tepeyac Hill wasn’t remarkable as far as hills are concerned. What made it remarkable was that it stood out, quite literally. The Nahua name Tepeyac refers to something nose-like, a protrusion jutting from the landscape the way a nose juts from a face. The Nahua glyph for Tepeyac includes a nose. Positioned at the northern side of the main causeway crossing Lake Texcoco into Tenochtitlan, Tepeyac was a landmark known to anyone traveling in or out of the Aztec capital. One late 16th century Spanish writer remarked on the expansive view its summit provided.

Tepeyac appears on one of the first European maps depicting the transformation of Mexico City after the Spanish conquest. The Uppsala Map of 1550, created a few decades after the apparition, prominently depicts a hill with the label Tepeacc at the end of the causeway linking the island city to the mainland (See the image above. Tepeyac Hill is to the right).

Beyond its height and its views, however, the hill was unremarkable. The two earliest narrative accounts of the apparition, both written in the late 1640s, describe Tepeyac at the time of Juan Diego’s encounter as desolate, barren, a wasteland.

Yet before Mary appeared there, the hill had not been empty of spiritual significance. According to primary and secondary sources, Tepeyac “had been the site of a pre-colonial pilgrimage shrine dedicated to a group of earth goddesses collectively called Tonantzin.”³

The most striking testimony to this comes from the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who arrived in New Spain in 1529 and spent decades documenting Nahua culture, language, and religion in his book, The General History of the Things of New Spain (better known as the Florentine Codex). It is a richly illustrated, bilingual (Spanish and Nahuatl) manuscript running to more than 2,500 pages.

Writing within a few years of the apparition itself, Sahagún observed:

“Near the mountains, there are three or four places where [the native population] were accustomed to perform very solemn sacrifices and they came to them from very distant lands. One of these is here in Mexico where there is a small mountain they call Tepeyacac. The Spaniards call it Tepeaquilla; now it is called Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. At this place they had a temple dedicated to the mother of the gods whom they called Tonantzin, which means Our Mother. There they performed many sacrifices in honor of this goddess. And they came to them from more than twenty leagues away, from all the border regions of Mexico, and they brought many offerings. Men and women, youths and maidens came to these feasts. There was a great conflux of people on these days, and they all said: “We are going to the feast of Tonantzin.” And now that a church of Our Lady of Guadalupe is built there, they also call her Tonantzin, being motivated by the preachers who called Our Lady, the Mother of God, Tonantzin. […] It appears to be a Satanic invention to cloak idolatry under the confusion of this name, Tonantzin. And they now come to visit this Tonantzin from very far away, as far away as before, which is also suspicious, because everywhere there are many churches of Our Lady and they do not go to them. They come from distant lands to this Tonantzin as in olden times.”⁴

Sahagún’s account is striking on several counts. He documents the pre-Columbian claim to Tepeyac as a shrine to an earth mother goddess and watches as it is transformed into a Marian cult. He is suspicious. Are the indigenous pilgrims venerating the Virgin, or are they quietly continuing to worship Tonantzin under a new name? It is also striking because he makes no mention of Juan Diego, no mention of Mary’s apparition, and no mention of the image. It is unusual that Sahagún, so careful in detailing so much about the life in his area, would fall silent on matters so miraculous. The hill for Sahagún was just a place of pre-Christian worship that the Spanish colonial church had claimed and rededicated.

A Message Built for its Audience

Why was Mary so insistent that her “house” and “temple” be built on Tepeyac Hill? Is there a Biblical connection between Mary and mountains? Not really. The Bible says surprisingly little about Mary in general, and certainly there is no explicit or strong Biblical connection between Mary or Marian devotion to mountains or hills. While mountains do play a prominent role in the Bible, her wanting a house on the summit of Tepeyac Hill might have more to do with pre-Columbian Aztec culture than it does with Judeo-Christian theology.

One of the two earliest textual records of the apparition story, the Huei Tlamahuiçoltica, written in Nahuatl in 1649 by Laso de la Vega, sheds some light on the matter. The text was deliberately composed in Nahuatl to reach a Nahua audience, to tell the story of the faith in a language and idiom the common people of Central Mexico could understand. In his preface, which he addressed to the Virgin Mary, Laso de la Vega notes that he is offering the story in Nahuatl so that the “humble commoners see here and find out in their language all the charitable acts you have performed on their behalf.”⁵ He also draws a comparison between the translation and image of the Virgin painted on Juan Diego’s cloak: “Your image that you yourself colored and painted by your own hand is also great, lofty, and wonderful; through it you wish us your children to cry out to you, especially the local people, the humble commoners to whom you revealed yourself.”⁶

The significance of the image on a cloak must not be overlooked. Even the central narrative within the Huei Tlamahuiçoltica is careful to point out that the type of cloak the image appeared on was not the type of cloak a Bishop or well-to-do nobleman would wear. It was the cloak of the commoner, what the Indians would wear.⁷ And within the apparition story itself, Mary insists that the message be carried by Juan Diego, a Nahua commoner.

This suggests that the choice of Tepeyac Hill as a site for a temple was not accidental. Spanish colonial missionaries, aware of how central pyramids, mountains, and mountaintop shrines were to Aztec religious life, may have deliberately situated the apparition on a hill already sacred in indigenous memory, replacing one mother-goddess cult with another, one mountain shrine with another. The engineered relationship would have made the new faith legible to its intended audience.

That the Spanish colonial administration was paying close attention to significance of mountains in its territories is suggested by a telling bureaucratic detail. In 1577, King Philip II of Spain dispatched a detailed questionnaire to local administrators across his overseas dominions, requesting historical, cultural, and geographical information about their regions. Question 18 asked administrators to report on any nearby remarkable mountains or mountain ranges, their distance, their direction, and their names. Mountains, it seems, were never far from the colonial imagination.

The Codex Escalada

The Codex Escalada Cleaned Up. Juan Diego on the left.

Primary Sources

The principle primary sources about the Virgin of Guadalupe are as follows:

Codex Escalada (1548): A disputed piece of parchment depicting Juan Diego kneeling before Mary on the summit of Tepeyac. The document functions as a kind of death certificate for Juan Diego, records his death date, and notes that the Virgin appeared to him in 1531. See image above.
Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex (The General History of the Things of New Spain) (1545–1590). A bilingual (Spanish and Nahuatl), richly illustrated manuscript of over 2,500 pages, now recognized as a foundational work in cultural anthropology. It describes the shrine at Tepeyac with notable suspicion, but makes no mention of the Juan Diego apparitions.
Miguel Sánchez, Image of the Virgin Mary (1648). The first published account of the Guadalupe apparitions and the miracles attributed to her image.
Luis Laso de la Vega, Huei Tlamahuiçoltica (1649). A Nahuatl-language account of the Guadalupe apparitions, composed for a Nahua audience. Scholars believe much of this account was borrowed from Sánchez.

Secondary Sources

D.A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix (2023).
Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness (1987).
Cayetano Reyes, El Altépetl, origen y desarrollo: construcción de la identidad regional náhuatl (2000).
Carl Anderson, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love (2017).
Mary Joan Winn Leith, The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction (2022).

The legend is a brief one, but there is more to the story than what I summarized above. Juan Diego meets Mary on the hill a few times, is followed by spies, and goes on a side quest to help his ailing uncle, who also gets visited by Mary. ↩︎
See Image of the Virgin Mary, Miguel Sánchez (1648). ↩︎
Leith, Chapter 4. ↩︎
English Translation of the Florentine Codex, Book 11, Folio 234r and 234v, by Anderson and Dibble. ↩︎
Sousa, Huei Tlamahuiçoltica, 55. ↩︎
Ibid., 57. ↩︎
Ibid., 89. ↩︎

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[Genius Loci] The Work, Creative K-Holes, Dead Forever

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

It’s me, Jeremy Bassetti, giving you another opportunity to gaze upon the strange species of animal called Scriptor dayjobicus strangulatus, more commonly known as the domestic writer-strangled-by-his-day-job.

In this month’s email, you’ll find a personal update, followed by notes on the joys of falling into creative K-holes, author platforms, some podcasts on books and writing, and the music of the Grateful Dead.

The year is 8.7% complete! This fact alone doesn’t unsettle me as much as accounting for how little of this time I’ve been able to spend forging ahead with The Work — the good work, the real work, the writing and thinking work, the research work, the creative work, the difficult but satisfying work, the work that you’d do even if it doesn’t pay the bills. And yet, time is what you make of it. Despite feeling pressure from the classes, the grading, the emails, and the meetings — ¡Jesúcristo! the emails and meetings! —, I’m realizing now that I’ve written over 6,500 words and done quite a bit of research. A good month can thus only be measured by how much of it is spent above ground,¹ surrounded by friends and family, and adding some bricks to that pyramid we call The Work.

While 6,500 sloppy words does not seem like an impressive amount over the course of a month, I’ll put it in my wins column given my constraints. I need to remind myself that I’ve managed to write 6,500 words despite a full-time job and a toddler at home. A toddler who has been having night terrors. A toddler who had an ear infection and the stomach flu for the better part of a week. A toddler who passed along his stomach flu to his parents. A toddler who took great pleasure in imitating the sound of his father retching. A toddler who plastered his father’s sweaty, cold, trembling body with glittery stickers of cute dinosaurs and pink hearts.

Like their quantity, the quality of those words is nothing to gush over. Them words are sloppy — loose. They’re half-formed and incomplete. They’re half drunk and in need a literary intervention. But they are the raw material of The Work. The bricks of the pyramid will eventually get adorned with a veneer of polished limestone. One hopes so, at least, but that’s for another day.

Creative K-Holes

I spent a large part of my free time in January researching the Virgin Mary for a chapter I’m working on. I’m particularly interested in her appearances on and around mountains. Mary might be a mountain climber, given her propensity for alpine appearances. The two best-known Marian apparitions happen to be ones on or around mountains: in Mexico (Guadalupe) and France (Lourdes). In Mexico and France (as in Bolivia and elsewhere), the Virgin Mary was loitering in mountainous areas.

I read two books about Mary. I started with Leith’s accessible The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction, which provides an overview of Mary’s role in the church and charts the history of Marian devotion in the past two thousand years. After reading Leith’s book, I dove into Carl Anderson’s Our Lady of Guadalupe. Anderson’s book is too apologetic — too evangelical — for me, but it is the best kind of book in that it opened new research directions and threw me into what I can only describe as a K-hole.² In this case, the state is caused not by ketamine but by research.

When lost in creative K-hole, one feels time, the environment, and the body almost dissolve. They slip away and we enter a trance-like state. Unlike an actual K-hole, it is a desired state, an overdose of curiosity and absorption. While in a creative K-hole, it is common for the fiend to look up at the clock perplexed that they had spent the last three hours, say, browsing through an online database of Nahuatl hieroglyphs.

This is why it is important to confront, entertain, and consider books you would otherwise dismiss, like I could have done with Carl Anderson’s book. You never know what insight, lead, idea, or turn of phrase you might find in them. In addition to the Nahuatl glyph database, Anderson’s book somehow led me to a small trove of primary sources like the marvelous Florentine Codex and secondary sources like the fantastic book El Altépetl, Origen y Desarrollo.

Academic studies like El Altépetl are among the books that matter most. They’re products of deep research, experience, and expertise. They’re often the distillation of years or even a lifetime of thinking and work. They are real contributions to history. But they rarely sell more than a few hundred copies, probably only to historians and academic institutions. Society gives less attention to what is more important.

Email Lists & Author Platforms

At the end of my winter break, I was thinking about my newsletter and my “author platform.” Authors often feel compelled to “build an audience” or “build a platform” because, as you know, publishers and agents like their authors to reach readers. Having an established platform does help with promotion, marketing, and sales. Forget about building social media profiles. One of the best tools of an author platform is an email list. Email lists are the gold standard, and there are strategies to build and maintain them. My own email list — the one that delivered to you the email you’re reading now, unless you’re reading this via RSS or on my site — actually shrank last year. This might not be a bad thing, after all. But size and growth is often a metric of reach and resonance. I discussed my mistakes with my email list last year so you can learn from them. Avoid my mistakes, grow your email list, and build your platform.

Podcasts

I’ve been limiting my podcast consumption lately, but when a friend sent me a podcast episode on Dante’s Divine Comedy I couldn’t resist. The podcast is called Old School and, from what I understand, its host Shilo Brooks interviews interesting people about the books that changed their lives. The episode was a wonderful conversation about the power of the poem, not least because of the guest’s harrowing story about losing his wife in a car accident when she was 8 1/2 months pregnant. The guest, a literature professor named Joseph Luzzi, found solace in Dante’s story. Reading Dante was part of his grieving process.

Near the end of the episode, Luzzi discussed academic writing and popular writing. He noted that while popular writing is often characterized as being simpler than academic writing, and academic writing is characterized as being more complicated than popular writing, the opposite is really true. He argues that popular writing is more difficult because distilling complex ideas into simple terms takes a great deal of time, energy, and skill. As I wrote before, academic writing is easier because style, clarity, and the ability to communicate the idea is subordinate to the idea, “original argument,” or disciplinary contribution itself. If communicating complicated ideas in ways that resonate with non-experts is a superpower, it is so because it is super hard.

I also stumbled onto an interview with author Tom Junod sharing his thoughts on writing. I especially enjoyed his ideas on use of AI in writing. Junod notes that writing is hard work as much as it is heart work. It is full of life, energy, and — for lack of a better term — soul. Those who use AI for their writing must think poorly of writing itself — as a soulless, heartless activity. And yet, using AI for soulless, heartless writing like social media posts, TPS reports, and data analyses is okay. But if you’re writing for a reason that matters, if you’re concerned with taste, beauty, ideas, and connection — is this not the stuff of writing? —, then AI can’t help.

Dead Forever

I dropped off a few rolls of film to get developed at a new film lab in town. The rolls were the last three to develop from 2025, shot in the months of May, September, and December. The May roll contained images I took during a Dead & Company concert my father invited me to at The Sphere in Las Vegas. On the day I developed the photos, news broke that the band’s singer and guitarist — Bob Weir — had died. The news caught us off guard. The music of the Grateful Dead has been in my father’s life since he was a teenager. It has been with me all my life, my father playing their albums in our home and car through a variety of media: vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and MP3s. But the live music was always the best. One mild April evening, my father took me to see my first concert: the Grateful Dead with opening act The Black Crowes. I was too young to fully appreciate what I was experiencing, but I knew it was weird. And weird was good. Between April 1995 and May 2025, my father and I have seen the band and its various incarnations play around 15 shows. The music had grown on me, but my main interest in going to the shows was to go with my dad and to see him fall into a sort of K-hole of his own, absorbed by music he loved and knew so well.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

That is, not six feet underground. ↩︎
A dissociative state where one feels detached from their body and environment as the result of overdosing on ketamine. So I’m told. ↩︎

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[Fieldnotes] What I Learned About Growing a Newsletter, Content Marketing, and Email Magnets

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:00:00 -0500

My email list lost subscribers at a 3:1 ratio last year. For every new person who signed up for my newsletter, three people left. There were several factors at play. But the main one was that I stopped producing content regularly and removed my “email magnet,” a method that had been bringing in around 50 new subscribers a month. I want to talk about this method, my experience using it and abandoning it, and why it works. I hope you can learn from my mistakes and use the method to grow your own email list, which is essential for nonfiction authors, photographers, or any other kind of content creator looking to build a platform.

Every time I open a social media app, my feeds are filled with content from accounts I don’t follow. An algorithm decides what I see, not my preferences. If you’re a creator or a business hoping to leverage social media, this is problematic because there’s no guarantee your followers will actually see what you post. Now you’re competing against slop and cat videos. Of course, the opposite is also true; an algorithm ensures your content has the potential to reach non-followers. But let’s not forget that in the days before algorithmic media became all the rage, both good and bad content was shared and went viral. It is reasonable to declare the follower dead in terms of reach and discoverability on social media platforms.

Beyond that, building a platform on someone else’s property is risky. A social media site might go kaput, change its algorithm, get sold to a questionable buyer, or promote voices and ideas with which you disagree.

The benefits to having an email list should be obvious in this context. You get to directly communicate with those who wish to hear from you. The relationship is direct and unmediated by a third party. Moreover, having a strong platform can help your career. For example, agents and publishers take author platform into consideration when deciding on whether to accept clients and buy book rights (in extreme cases, platform is the deciding factor).

What I Did Right (And Then Stopped Doing)

From 2019 to 2023, I ran a podcast and website called Travel Writing World. I published a new episode every two weeks. Around 2021, I was consistently getting 50 new email subscribers on average every month. For a small niche like travel literature, this was a huge win.

My secret formula? Publishing regularly + an email magnet.

An email magnet is a free resource — a PDF, guidebook, worksheet, zine, ebook, or any type of digital download — that you give someone in exchange for their email address. Mine was a 40-page PDF document related to travel writing.

The value exchange was clear: I’ll give you a helpful resource if you join my monthly newsletter. It worked consistently, month after month.

The Mistake That Cost Me

I stepped away from the podcast to focus on my own writing and photography projects. I stopped publishing regular episodes, reduced my social media presence to almost nothing, and I took down the email magnet from my website.

The result? In 2025, my subscriber-to-unsubscriber ratio inverted and hit 1:3.

Were there other factors for the unsubscribes? Probably. Reduced engagement, fewer touchpoints with my audience, less consistent content. But the biggest factor was 1) not publishing content regularly and 2) removing the incentive for new people to join my list.

The Two-Step Method for Email List Growth

After analyzing what went wrong, the solution became clear. Growing an email list consistently requires two things:

Thing 1: Show up regularly and create content people want to engage with.

This could be YouTube videos, podcast episodes, blog posts, social media content, or whatever format works for your niche, goals, and audience. The key is quality, consistency, and value.

Thing 2: Direct people to your newsletter’s email magnet.

In every piece of content you create, include a call-to-action that leads people to a valuable freebie (an “email magnet”) in exchange for their email address. Many creators skip this step because email lists can take a while to set up and because creating a worthy “email magnet” can be difficult.

You can create content all day long, but without a clear call-to-action or incentive for people to give you their email address, your list won’t grow at the rate it could. And you’ll be subjected to the caprice of a social media site.

What Makes a Good Email Magnet?

I believe your email magnet should be relevant to your work and your audience’s interests. In other words, a travel literature podcast shouldn’t offer a PDF on growing tomatoes. The magnet will be irresistible if it is helpful, valuable, and interesting for your audience.

Examples of email magnets include: a checklist or worksheet, a how-to guide or tutorial, a template or framework, behind-the-scenes content, a mini-course or video series, a curated resource list, a sample chapter from your book, an entire PDF book, etc.

The format matters less than the alignment and value.

How I’m Rebuilding My Email List in 2026

I’m currently writing a book proposal, and the reality is that agents and publishers like to see authors with established platforms. So I’m rebuilding mine, and that means bringing back a regular content touchpoint and an email magnet.

For my regular content touchpoint, I’ve decided to double down on video this year. I’ll be doing a series of YouTube videos and, hopefully, convert them to short-form video for cross posting on social media. I don’t want to do regular podcast interviews anymore, unless they specifically relate to mountains — and even in this case, focusing on my own work and research is my priority.

For my email magnet, I’m considering two options. The easy route is to offer a book I wrote a few years ago as a free PDF or EPUB. The work is already done — I just need to set up the signup form. The harder (but potentially better) route is to create a new resource specifically tied to my mountains project — something like a guide, zine, or behind-the-scenes document that offers real value to people interested in my kind of work.

More soon!

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[Genius Loci] Resolutions, Changes Coming, Friendship

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0500

Genius Loci readers:

A very happy New Year to you and yours!

I’m feeling optimistic and charged for what this year might bring. The New Year grants permission to hit reset. It is a natural transition point, an ideal time to reflect on who we were and who we might become. I know there’s pessimism surrounding New Year’s resolutions, but I’m a proponent of them. Sure, the new year is as a good time as any to make changes. But how can the collective energy around change and improvement possibly be a bad thing? The new year is a psychological break. Sure, most resolutions get abandoned within weeks, but the intention is important as it involves identifying that which needs to be changed. The collective momentum and energy at this time of year to renew, to reboot, to reset is palpable. Ride the wave.

In what’s below, you’ll find the theme of change oozing out of the holes of these very letters. First, you’ll find a personal update. It is followed by a note on some changes to this newsletter and a note on friendship in the digital age.

Personal Update

With the holidays and family in town, December was light on writing. I managed around 1,000 words on my book’s Introduction. Many of those words may end up in the boneyard (a section at the end my document where I bury all the darlings I kill), but that’s part of the writing and editing process. You write to figure out what you think, and then you refine your thoughts or remove what’s not relevant.

On my website, I published two On Mountains posts. One simply announced the arrival of a new mountain-related podcast hosted by Jason König, Jonathan Westaway, and Jonathan Pitches. The second post was prompted by the aforementioned podcast’s first guest, and relates to the idea of mountains a safe spaces or protectors.

I also posted my end-of-year review for 2025. It’s mostly behind-the-scenes thinking about my creative practice and platform. You might find it useful, or you might not. Either way, it’s there. One takeaway from my end-of-year review: I’m doubling down on my creative work and how I share it. This newsletter is part of that recalibration, and some changes are coming to it.

This newsletter will undergo a slight shift. It will continue offering a round-up of what I’ve been up to and chronicling my creative progress and thinking, but in a mosaic-like way — so you’re not stunned by a 1k-2k word narrative in your inbox. The earliest iteration of this newsletter was a series of links from around the web related to travel, writing, and photography. It won’t return to that, exactly, but it will have a similar vibe — linking out and unpacking more as it relates to my own cultural consumption. Not documenting what I’ve been eating, but journaling what I’ve been metabolizing, creatively and culturally speaking. It’s not about performing expertise, making proclamations, or being polished.

The long-form essays and reflections won’t go away. They’ll just migrate from the body of the newsletter to my site’s Fieldnotes section, where I’ll link to them in these round-ups. I’m doing this to clearly delineate my writing and thinking, but also — honestly — to give space for the more important work (my proposal) instead of this self-imposed deadline and pressure to churn out something substantial every month. Sometimes the best way to write the thing that matters is to stop pretending everything else matters equally.

Marie Høeg, Ingeborg Berg, and Dog in a Rowing Boat, ca. 1895–1903.

Friendship

An online friend and I started an accountability group for creative work. We designed it to bounce ideas, offer support, share encouragement, and give feedback when requested. It feels good to have this space for camaraderie and idea generation. But having it also forced me to come to terms with the fact that I don’t have many friends. Very few real, flesh-and-blood, spit-in-handshake friends, at least. Certainly few in my area I can talk to about creative work. Few writer friends. Few eager to form new friendships, to shoot the proverbial shit.

I suppose modern adulthood is like this. We’re too busy with our own lives to make space for genuine friendship. I have a handful of work “friends” (if you can call them that), and some real friends (one of whom graduated from the work-friend category to the friend-friend one). But none that are undergoing the same creative struggles I am. Friend’s don’t need to be facsimiles of ourselves, but the more aligned you are with a friend the better you two are able to relate to one another, to understand one another. The standard advice to make friends revolves around interests: if you’re into, say, crocheting, attend a crocheting meetup. But what if there’s no local meetup for “people trying to finish their non-fiction book proposals while holding down a day job and trying to build an online platform”?

Sometimes my wife asks me who I am texting with. And she seems perplexed when I tell her I am chatting with “So-and-so, an online friend.” And yet I feel saying the word “online” diminishes the friendship. Online friends are real friends. At least they can be. We have real conversations. We share pain and sorrows and small victories. We might not have suffered or endured physical rites of passage together like the kids in The Goonies. But if you form an online friendship, they are your people, even if geography separates you. This is one of the great gifts of the internet.

But if proximity doesn’t matter, why then has the communication with my highschool and college friends, who all now live far away, been reduced to sharing memes and videos on social media? That you have a shared past with someone is important in the definition of friendship, but that you have a shared present with someone is important in the formation and of new ones and in the maintenance of the ones you’ve already made.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

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[Fieldnotes] 2025 End of Year Review

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 01:00:00 -0500

I’ve written end-of-year reviews for the past four years. In keeping with tradition, below are my reflections on 2025 and my plans for 2026.

2025 in Numbers

Website Posts: 38
Total Words Published: ~57,000
Creative Journey Podcast Interviews: 3
On Mountains Podcast Interviews: 2
YouTube Videos: 3
2025 Self-Assessment: 6.5/10

2025 Overview

Overall, 2025 felt exhausting. I am tired, drained, depleted. Without a doubt, wrangling a toddler had something to do with my exhaustion. But other factors are weighing down upon me, which I’ll briefly discuss below. I say briefly because, while I think it is beneficial to be open and honest, I don’t want to wallow in negativity.

This time last year, I said that 2025 would be a year of focus and simplicity. I wanted my work to come first, after family, and to focus my efforts on my main subject area instead of spreading my attention across too many areas. I held true to these principles. Mostly. I’ll continue these principles in 2026, but I’ll try to increase my output. More on this below.

Creatively, I feel like I am on the right track despite there not being many visible signs of progress or growth. That’s okay, if a bit frustrating. But I need to remind myself that I’m working on a new project (at least it is new in the sense that I’m sharing my work publicly). And at this stage, I am building a system of roots and rhizomes. Eventually they’ll bear vegetation and (hopefully) some fruit, but now it’s about establishing a solid foundation and some discipline.

After discussing some wins (On Mountains and a research trip to Bolivia), I’ll reflect on my book proposal, my day job and its impact on my work, alcohol and its impact on my work, and then on my public-facing work like podcasting, social media, newsletters, and YouTube. Finally, I’ll reflect on why I scored myself a 6.5/10 in my 2025 self assessment, and some goals for 2026.

On Mountains

In the second half of the year, I launched a new microsite on my website called On Mountains. The microsite houses my notes, research, and thoughts on my mountain-related work. It is where I am “working with the garage door open.” On Mountains also has a sporadic and intermittent podcast where I interview writers, historians, researchers, and creatives who think about mountains.

This was a major step for me, mostly because it acted like a formal declaration of intent — this is where my focus will be for the foreseeable future. I’ve been thinking about this mountain project for years, so publishing work in this area feels like progress.

I published 18 posts to On Mountains since May 2025. I expect to publish more than that in 2026.

Bolivia

I visited Bolivia again in August to do more mountain-book research. I visited the cities of Cochabamba and Quillacollo during the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña. I was able to get some more interviews and material for the chapter I’m working on. But, I haven’t written this material into the chapter yet. My notes and interviews remain in a raw state. Incorporating this new material into the chapter will be a goal for the first half of 2026.

I also recorded a lot of video, which I’m also sitting on. The idea was to create a YouTube video on the Festival of Urkupiña, but I haven’t been motivated. To be honest, the prospect of putting this video together seems daunting. There has too much friction.

Book Proposal

I can’t say that I made a lot of progress on the book proposal in 2025. Sure, I picked and pecked at it. But I didn’t make major progress. I think part of the reason why I didn’t make progress in this area is because I was too scattered with On Mountains. If you visit On Mountains, you’ll see that the posts jump around a bit in terms of space, time, and culture. I need to be more strategic about my work, publishing research and notes that relate directly to the book proposal area I’m currently working on. I think this will help keep me on track. For example, if I am working on a book proposal chapter about Bolivia and the Andes, my On Mountains work needs to relate to that. Bouncing around from idea to idea isn’t helpful.

Day Job Blues

I don’t want to harp on my day job too much, but it is relevant here because it impacts my creative pursuits. My day job continues to be a major time sink in my life. It also takes an emotional toll on me. There has been a massive shakeup at my institution. Everything has changed, from job descriptions to compensation to workloads and expectations to division structure to leadership teams to evaluations to contract terms… I’m teaching more classes in more formats, and I have more non-teaching responsibilities. There is just more work on my plate.

This is wearisome now. But there is a bight side. The trade-off for all of this work is that I’m out-of-office from May to mid-August in 2026. I’ll get this “break” every two years, with the entire month of May and half of August off in alternating years. We’re working more during the semesters, but we have more time off in the summers. This is the light at the end of this long, dark tunnel.

I need to treat my day job more like a means to an end, to treat it more like - as my wife likes to say - a job at McDonald’s: you clock in, do what you need to do with a smile, and clock out. My problem is that work raises my blood pressure. It never has anything to do with teaching. It always has to do with my “service to the college,” duties that all professors are required to do that comes with endless meetings and an unhealthy dose of despair. It regularly impacts my sleep and my relationships.

Alcohol

Perhaps this is related to my day job stress: after two years of avoiding alcohol, I started drinking again in 2025. It was a decision I almost immediately regretted. Two years of sobriety makes it easy to see its effects on my energy, my mental and physical health, my wallet, and my productivity — on pretty much everything.

A lot of people think new-year resolutions are ridiculous. Their point, which is fair, is: Why not resolve to make a change when you identify a problem? Why wait until the New Year? Why not act now? This makes sense if there is a major, immediate issue that needs to be resolved. For example, hitting rock bottom or, say, surviving a heart attack might force someone to make immediate changes. For less urgent changes, I find New Years resolutions to be powerful. The new year offers a clean break, a natural time to hit reset, a psychological transition to start something new or to leave behind something undesirable.

So, starting tomorrow, I will begin another year without drinking. But, tonight, I’m going to enjoy one last glass of Côtes du Rhône.

Podcasting

Podcasting wasn’t a major focus for me in 2025. In addition to the episodes published on the On Mountains podcast, I published a few interviews on Creative Journeys with Pico Iyer, Aatish Taseer, and Lance Richardson. I don’t foresee my relationship to podcasting changing in 2026.

Social media wasn’t a huge distraction for me in 2025. In fact, social media has received little attention from me in the past two years. I posted 5 photos on Instagram for the whole of 2024 and one — just one! — post in 2025. I don’t have any social media apps on my phone, with the exception of Bluesky.

While staying off social media has been great for my time, it hasn’t been so great for my platform. Without a means for people to “discover” your work, without a regular touch point where you “engage”, and without a streamlined, coherent vision, your platform will contract. At least, that’s what I’ve experienced. Because agents and publishers like to see authors with “platforms,” engaging on social media and “creating content” is critical for the modern creative. Having a strong “platform” helps sell book proposals and, ultimately, books. It happens all the time — celebrities and “influencers” getting book deals solely on the merit of their reach and popularity.

It pains me to say this, but publishing posts on your website is probably not enough on its own to “build an audience” in 2026 and beyond. This is especially true with the pressure AI has exerted onto search traffic. In my view, website publishing and blogging is still an important ingredient, but it seldom can make a complete meal on its own.

With this in mind, I will start engaging on social media (and other forms of media) more in 2026. Being strategic about building my platform and presence will help my goals. I am still working out my strategy for 2026, but I will likely employ the “post and ghost” method so I don’t get sucked into the various algorithms. I don’t want to be “everywhere,” but I think leveraging AI can help with social media grunt work. For example, asking AI to draft posts based on articles might be a good use of AI. As is asking AI software to extract “short form” video snippets from “long form” videos. More on this topic coming soon.

Newsletters

Because of my low engagement levels on social media (and other forms of media, like podcasting and YouTube), 2025 was the first year since 2019 that I saw negative newsletter growth. More people unsubscribed from my newsletters than joined. Despite more people visiting my website and reading my work compared to the previous year, I got a 3:1 ratio of unsubs to subs. The numbers are small, but for every one subscriber I got, three left.

Why did I experience negative newsletter growth? I can point to the following reasons.

Not showing up anywhere consistently. Not posting on social media, on YouTube, or podcast episodes on a regular basis. My “discoverability” is based on one touchpoint: website articles via search. I am not harnessing other platforms to share my ideas.
No “email magnet.” I deleted my old Travel Writing World email offer, a 40-page PDF that I gave to readers who signed up to my mailing list. “Email offers” entice people to subscribe.
Inconsistent topical interests and messaging made my work and its value proposition opaque. What do you stand for? What topics do you cover? What is your approach? Why should people join you on your journey?
Inconsistent and uninteresting emails.

YouTube

One of my principles for 2025 was to simplify and to narrow my topical focus. As a result, I ignored YouTube. I only posted three videos, two of which were nearly finished at the end of 2024 and got published in the first month of 2025. Most of my previous videos on YouTube were about photography and not about my main area of interest: mountains. It felt too scattered, inconsistent. So, I stopped posting to YouTube. As a result, I lost monetization. Which is fine. The space that quitting YouTube created helped me establish On Mountains.

But I intend to return to YouTube as part of my social media, platform-building strategy. I am bullish on YouTube. It is more engaging than other social media platforms. Plus, a video can find viewers well after its publication. Case in point: YouTube is the only platform I’m seeing subscriber growth based on old videos despite being virtually absent.

Anyway, I’m going to increase my video output in 2026. There will be a strategy, and it will be related to my main work.

Self Assessment

So why a 6.5 out of 10? The score reflects a year of mixed results. On the positive side, I launched On Mountains, which was a significant creative milestone. I stayed focused on my main subject area and didn’t scatter my attention across too many projects. I made it to Bolivia for research. I published consistently on my website. These are real accomplishments, and they kept me above the midpoint. But the score also accounts for what I didn’t do. I made minimal progress on my book proposal, which is the linchpin of my creative project. I lost newsletter subscribers for the first time in years. I abandoned YouTube and social media, which hurt my platform. And personally, I started drinking again after two years sober, a decision that drained my energy and productivity. The 6.5 reflects a year where I maintained forward momentum in some areas while losing ground in others. I didn’t fail, but I didn’t thrive either.

The assessment also captures how I feel about the year, not just what I accomplished. Exhaustion colors everything. When you’re drained, even your wins feel smaller. I built roots and laid groundwork, which is essential but invisible work. It’s hard to feel great about a year when the tangible results didn’t materialize. But I also recognize that not every year can be a 9 or 10. Sometimes you’re in a building phase, and the payoff comes later. The 6.5 acknowledges the reality of where I am: still in the game, still making progress, but far from where I want to be.

2026 Goals

Finish Book Proposal
- Pitch Section
- Introduction
- Sample Chapter on Bolivia
Query Agents Late Summer 2026
Early May Research Trip (Mexico? Egypt?)
Publish Video on the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña
Platform Building
- Create Newsletter Email “Magnet”
- Create and Execute Social Media Plan

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[On Mountains] The Carpathians as Protectors: Mountains as Active Protectors and Agents

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 07:00:00 -0400

Mountains are spaces of safety. This idea has been with us for a long time. Yet, we seem to have forgotten this idea and have replaced it with a contradictory one that asserts that before the early modern era, humans feared and avoided mountains. This misunderstanding is so pervasive that I’ve called it a modern myth, a folktale for the modern generation. A cursory reading of the Old Testament does a pretty good job of dispelling the myth.¹ Yet the idea is a bit older than the Old Testament and appears in humanity’s oldest literary texts, the Epic of Gilgamesh and other cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia. While I usually roll my eyes when I read phrases like “since the dawn of time” in student papers, I can confidently say here that humans have equated mountains with safety since the dawn of human culture.

The mountains = safety idea was recently and briefly discussed in the inaugural episode of the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures podcast. The episode features Alexandra Cotofana discussing her 2022 book Xenophobic Mountains. The book explores how the Carpathian Mountains in Romania have been perceived as active political and moral agents that protect the nation by punishing ethno-religious “others.”

The Carpathian Mountains, according to Cotofana, serve as active protectors in Romanian popular memory. They sheltered local peoples from waves of imperial conquest. In one of Romania’s popular stories, one that resembles the Roman myth of Apollo and Daphne, the Dacian princess Dochia asked the gods to turn her to stone rather than submit to Emperor Trajan’s territorial and sexual advances. Later, the same mountains became a kind of barrier or protector against Ottoman expansion, with the landscape itself perceived as working alongside local defenders. In reality, the mountains didn’t stop the Ottomans, but they were imagined to have done so.²

During times of conflict, knowledge of a landscape is a strategic asset. Knowing the mountains, for example, helps them become a kind of safe haven. We saw this during the American invasion of Afghanistan, when Osama bin Laden and his band hid in the country’s Tora Bora mountains and used them to escape into neighboring Pakistan. Anyone who studies history will recognize a similar pattern.

The Cotofana interview left me thinking about how widespread this “head for the hills” impulse is across cultures and throughout history, especially during times of war, and how regularly the language of “mountain as safe space” or “mountain as protector” appears. Mountains can be passive sites of shelter and, as the podcast interview points out, can also be seen or understood as active agents in human survival. We can therefore frame the mountains = safety idea through the lens of strategic geography or sentient landscapes.

Also see Mountains Before Mountaineering by Dawn Hollis. ↩︎
What comes to mind here are the Pyrenees and how they were imagined to be barriers against various “others,” first against the Muslims and later against the Spanish themselves. ↩︎

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[On Mountains] A New Mountains Podcast: 'Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures'

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 07:00:00 -0400

Jason König, Jonathan Westaway, and Jonathan Pitches have launched a new podcast called Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures, exploring humanity’s relationship with mountains through culture, history, and creative practice.

The podcast is part of a broader “mountain humanities” initiative that focuses on how people have responded to mountain in culture and across time and geography. Each episode will feature expert guests sharing new research and perspectives on mountain communities around the world.

Their approach might be from an academic perspective, though the hosts noted that they’ll speak with those engaging with mountains from an artistic or cultural perspective.

The inaugural episode, published December 16, features cultural anthropologist Alexandra Cotofana discussing her work on the Romanian Carpathians, including the concept of “sentient landscapes” and how mountain narratives intersect with contemporary Romanian politics.

You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or directly on the Mountain Stories, Mountain Futures website.

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Jeremy Bassetti

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