Mount Etna

Mount Etna appears in Jean-Baptiste Clamence's confession as the most vivid emblem of the heights he once inhabited—a natural balcony from which he could dominate the sea and the island, bathed in sunlight, far above the human ants. It represents the lost world of clarity, mastery, and innocent self-regard that he abandoned after the laughter on the Pont des Arts and the drowning he failed to prevent on the Pont Royal.

The Summit as a Way of Life

Clamence confesses that he never felt comfortable except in lofty places. He preferred the bus to the subway, open carriages to taxis, terraces to closed-in rooms, and on boats he was the eternal pacer of the top deck. In the mountains he fled the deep valleys for the passes and plateaus; he was, he says, the man of the mesas. A natural balcony fifteen hundred feet above a sea still visible, bathed in sunlight, was the place where he could breathe most freely, especially if he were alone, well above the human ants. He could readily understand why sermons, decisive preachings, and fire miracles took place on accessible heights. In his opinion no one meditated in cellars or prison cells—unless they were situated in a tower with a broad view—one just became moldy. He understood that man who, having entered holy orders, gave up the frock because his cell, instead of overlooking a vast landscape as he expected, looked out on a wall. Clamence himself did not grow moldy; at every hour of the day, within himself and among others, he would scale the heights and light conspicuous fires, and a joyful greeting would rise toward him.

Etna and the Lost Islands

What Clamence likes most in the world is Sicily, and especially from the top of Mount Etna, in the sunlight, provided he dominates the island and the sea. He also loves Java, but at the time of the trade winds. In a general way, he likes all islands—it is easier to dominate them. This preference for islands and summits is a longing for a world where the self can be the sole sovereign, where the landscape itself offers no ambiguity, no hidden laughter, no moral complexity. The Greek archipelago gave him the contrary feeling to the Dutch fog: constantly new islands would appear on the horizon, their treeless backbone marking the limit of the sky and their rocky shore contrasting sharply with the sea. No confusion possible; in the sharp light everything was a landmark. From one island to another, ceaselessly on a little boat that was nevertheless dawdling, he felt as if they were scudding along, night and day, on the crest of the short, cool waves in a race full of spray and laughter. Since then, Greece itself drifts somewhere within him, on the edge of his memory, tirelessly.

The Fall into the Flat Landscape

In Amsterdam, by contrast, everything is horizontal, no relief; space is colorless, and life dead. It is universal obliteration, everlasting nothingness made visible. The concentric canals resemble the circles of hell—the middle-class hell, peopled with bad dreams. When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life—and hence its crimes—becomes denser, darker. Here, Clamence says, they are in the last circle. The center of things is here, although they stand at the tip of the continent. The sky of Holland is filled with millions of doves, invisible because of their altitude, which flap their wings, rise or fall in unison, filling the heavenly space with dense multitudes of grayish feathers carried hither and thither by the wind. The doves wait up there all year round; they wheel above the earth, look down, and would like to come down, but there is nothing but the sea and the canals, roofs covered with shop signs, and never a head on which to light. Clamence himself, in his new life, sits enthroned among his bad angels at the summit of the Dutch heaven and watches ascending toward him, as they issue from the fogs and the water, the multitude of the Last Judgment.

The Unreachable Height

Mount Etna thus becomes the lost paradise of a self that could still believe in its own innocence and its own power. The memory of that summit—sunlight, dominance, the sea visible far below—is the measure of Clamence's fall into the little-ease of his Amsterdam existence, where he can neither stand upright nor lie down, and where he must live on the diagonal, a collapsed prophet for shabby times. The height he now occupies is only the ironic throne of a judge-penitent who has accepted duplicity and who dominates by confessing his own infamy, not by standing on a real mountain in the sun.