new illumination
On the Hudson River School, Before Sunset, & climbing Bull Hill in the first week of January
I spent much of last year thinking I might write a book about the Hudson River School, a group of 19th-century American landscape painters. First, I imagined a book of essays. I'd walk into the Catskills, visiting places important to the movement—Kaaterskill Clove and Kaaterskill Falls, North-South Lake, Sunset Rock, and Inspiration Point—to write about the paintings and observe the changing landscape. And I did. I returned to these places until the soles of my hiking boots fell off one afternoon as I descended South Mountain. But I couldn't get the writing to coalesce.
Then I thought I might write a novel that followed the life of a painting from mountainous sketch to gallery exhibition to permanent collection. These ideas tugged but didn't stick.
recently shared a beautiful piece about January as an in-between month, about the cyclical nature of creativity. While reading it, I realized how much 2023 felt like an in-between year—between projects, between ideas, writing slowly while waiting for a greater theme or form to emerge.On a Tuesday morning last year, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a painting by Sanford Robinson Gifford called A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove). I'd been slowly writing an essay about a visit to Kaaterskill Falls in the eastern Catskills. The essay was about deep time and the great gravitational forces of our lives.
The night before, I'd watched Before Sunset, the 2004 Ricard Linklater film—another attempt to untangle the essay. It is the second movie in the Before trilogy, with a story by Linklater and Kim Krizan. In the film, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) reunite in Paris nine years after their first meeting in Vienna.
My heart was in my throat, looking at the Gifford painting. It seemed to glow on the canvas. There had been rain the day I visited the falls. Everything was green and gray. And here was the same scene rendered in gold—how impossibly bright. I was looking at the painting and thinking about the moment Jesse looks up in the bookshop to see Céline standing before him for the first time in nearly a decade—a sudden, confronting brightness.
And then, into the museum walked Ethan Hawke, older than I'd seen him the night before. I found a gallery bench and sat, all of it moving through—time and land and those we love, clouds and the threat of rain or snow, then sun, then clarity.
Earlier this week, I read Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard cover to cover and ran into the mountains looking for clarity. I went north from the city toward Cold Spring and laced my new hiking books to climb Bull Hill.
Someone told me once how the hill got its name. A wild bull wreaking havoc on the mountain was chased and cornered by farmers. Rather than face capture, the bull leaped to its death, giving name to both Bull Hill and nearby Breakneck Ridge.
I imagined the wild bull like Pelagia, the virgin martyr who threw herself from a window before soldiers reached her to preserve her chastity. And I remembered the myth—Poseidon sending forth a beautiful bull from the sea. When the bull wasn't sacrificed as expected, the sea god sent the bull into wildness. It destroyed the Cretan countryside, becoming the 7th labor of Hercules.
Once, there was a petition to change Bull Hill's name to Mount Taurus. Taurus is a prominent winter constellation. Aldebaran, a red giant star that is the bull's eye in the Taurus constellation, is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and claims an orbiting planet six times the size of Jupiter. My mind reeled as I climbed, seizing upon everything, landing nowhere.
Ascending the hill from Washburn Trail, the trees opened up into an expanse and the man-made cliffs of an abandoned quarry. A raven followed, croaking some news of the new year. I thought of the Annie Dillard line, "It is still the first week of January, and I've got great plans." I envy Annie's conviction. I'm still waiting for great plans to reveal themselves.
From the top of the quarry, I looked down onto the river and the mountains on the other side—Crows Nest, Storm King, and Butter Hill. It is the only true fjord in the eastern United States.
When he was small, my son wrote a poem called "Snow." In it, the Storm King threw his white cloak over the world. Looking out over the river, there was no snow to speak of, only gray and brown. January. The Tulip trees and American witch hazel and flowering dogwood, all bare.
In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard recounts her childhood habit of tucking pennies in the cracks of sidewalks for strangers to stumble upon and drawing arrows in chalk toward the coins with the words SURPRISE AHEAD.
The softness of the first week of January has felt like this—everywhere surprises, a blur, the gentle haze of winter, then sudden illumination.
That is what happened on Bull Hill. It was an easy climb to the lookout. Cold Spring, below, looked protected, nestled among the hills. The sky was a blanket of gray. And then, without warning, light. Sun broke through a patch of cloud, and the whole swelling scene was illuminated—purple and blue in the sky, green on the mountains, brightness bouncing off the river's surface whose depth suddenly seemed to make itself known.
Dillard writes, "The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise.”
In the moment of light, I had to sit to steady myself. There was the wild bull in flight, there was the hill intact as it had been before the Hudson River Stone Corporation began extracting rock from the earth, and there was the fjord itself forming as the light broke through and I sat at the lookout. As quickly as the light had come, it was gone, and the sun too, slipping behind Crows Nest, leaving me to trek down in the dusk.
"The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the cracks, and the mountains slam," says Dillard.
It is the first week of January, and time feels strange here. Visions come and go quickly. All I know to do is to go into the mountain and come out again, to keep working, to keep writing, to trust that illumination will come.
Before you go, here are some things I loved this week:
’s recent piece in Craft Talk, When the Musicians Spoke, is about knowing when you're done with a book or writing project. You can pre-order Jami's book here.(I'm thrilled to be guest hosting this week's live podcast interview with Jami at the London Writers' Salon. Join us!)
’s First Love interview with the wonderful is the first in a series of conversations with writer friends about writing and friendship. You can pre-order Lilly's book (also about friendship!) here.P.S. Also in London Writers’ Salon news, the brilliant
and I are running a four-week sprint on launching a newsletter you’re proud of. We kick off this week and would love to have you join us!
Love this, and thank you for the shout out!!
This was a beautiful piece.