Tania Kovats
A Library of Mountain Beauty
A Library of Mountain Beauty
There is a small sketch in Chapter X11, Volume IV of John Ruskin's Modern Painters - Of Mountain Beauty - showing a drawing of several books that have been lined up and allowed to slump over. This was what Ruskin used to help visualise his explanation of how the lateral ranges of mountains are formed.
Ruskin's drawings of mountains and rocks are informed by many years of pacing the Alps. The drawings reveal his understanding of landscape - the landscapes that are present and those that are already absent, where geological forces have crushed out what was there. His fundamental insight was that these landmasses were not fixed, but that they were in a state of flux, cast up by colossal forces and still in motion. Drawing then became the perfectly fluid form that could describe and encapsulate this slow movement.
The row of books at the end of my desk is a landscape, a terrain with an unmappable depth. At anytime you could fall into the crevasses between the covers and leave this world for another. The landscapes will change each time you find and open another book, the way you might change a picture to alter your view. At this moment, the book is changing status, moving away from a tactile experience in the hand to something that appears to glow on a screen, without smell or dust or topography.
Here is a library of mountain beauty.
Tania Kovats
