Walking with Plato (17 page)

By this stage, I had become aware that the beauty of the Pennine Way is of a very different sort than the beauty of the Great Glen Way and the West Highland Way.

The beauty of those other trails – at least, insofar as Wendy and I experienced them – is predominantly of a gentle, harmonious kind. It’s the beauty of green meadows and rolling hills, of purple-flowering heather and yellow-flowering broom, of tranquil lakes and gurgling streams, and of forest paths dappled in sunlight.

But the beauty of the Pennine Way is often harsh and discordant, and, at times, not unmixed with a trace of ugliness. It’s the beauty of marshes and bogs, of jagged rocks and formless crags, of meagre trees on windswept moors, of fearful cascades, and of mist-shrouded peaks.

The landscapes of the Great Glen Way and the West Highland Way are beautiful in a way that evokes feelings of tranquillity and pleasure, whereas the landscapes of the Pennine Way have more of the sublime about them. They too give pleasure, but of a more acute kind, which stimulates as often as it soothes the mind.

Earlier in my journey, I had asked myself what it is that makes the countryside so soothing to the spirit and so refreshing to the soul. But the question had proved too deep and difficult for me to make much progress with it. Fortunately, however, finer intellects than mine have tackled the same question with greater success. Most notably, Schopenhauer.

Like many nineteenth-century intellectuals, Schopenhauer weighed in on the then fashionable debate about the beautiful and the sublime, and the way we experience them. His account runs as follows.

When we encounter a beautiful object, such as a flower or a mountain lake, we may, if we are in a suitable frame of mind, lose ourselves in contemplation of it. At such times, our ego, our desire, our will, is temporarily quieted. We appreciate the object not for what it is in relation to ourselves, but simply for what it is in itself. We take a disinterested pleasure in it.

For as long as this aesthetic experience lasts, we are freed from our ordinary, self-conscious way of apprehending the world. We enjoy, for a time, the profound tranquillity of will-less contemplation.

But when we encounter the sublime – perhaps when gazing up into a starry sky or looking out over the edge of a precipice – the experience is more complex.

Sublime objects have something about them that is hostile to the human will, something that overpowers, or threatens, or overwhelms, something of pain or fear. They have a kind of beauty – often breath-taking in its intensity – but it is a terrible beauty.

Such things reveal to us the smallness and insignificance of ourselves, our wills, and our desires. In doing so, they enable us, for a time, to abandon ourselves, and to give ourselves over to the world.

When we contemplate the sublime, we don’t so much forget ourselves as free ourselves. We don’t lose consciousness of the will and its desires, but instead are liberated from them. And this gives rise to a kind of rapture, to, in Schopenhauer’s words, a ‘state of elevation’.

If all of this sounds a bit fanciful and overblown, I can state quite categorically, from my own experience, that it isn’t. It describes
exactly
the way I feel when I gaze up at the stars. On the one hand, I am conscious of myself and my cares and my desires, but, on the other hand, I am blissfully conscious that they don’t amount to a hill of beans.

From Dufton, the Pennine Way heads in an easterly direction for thirteen miles to
Langdon Beck
.

For JoGLErs, like Wendy and me, this section of the Way is a complete waste of time and effort in a purely goal-orientated sense, since Langdon Beck is actually further away from Land’s End than Dufton is. But, despite this, we enjoyed it immensely.

The walk, as a whole, was a pleasant one across high moors and pastures, between fells, and along the banks of Maize Beck and the River Tees. And in addition to all of the general pleasantness there were a number of special delights.

A few miles from Dufton, the path ascends steeply and then traverses for a mile or two along the northwestern rim of High Cup, a gigantic U-shaped glacial valley. This geological wonder, which looks like a colossal grass-covered meteor scar, is one of the scenic highlights of the entire Pennine Way.

The path continues to High Cup Nick, the apex of the valley, where Wendy and I stopped for a mid-morning break to enjoy the stunning view of High Cup stretching away below us.

After that, we walked a further five miles across the fells, arriving early in the afternoon at Cauldron Snout, Britain’s longest waterfall. We sat there for a long time, eating lunch and watching the River Tees blast its way with explosive force through a series of rocky cataracts. Finally, we hiked the last few miles to our destination, the YHA at the tiny hamlet of Langdon Beck. This took quite some time, since this part of the route includes a lengthy, physically demanding scramble along a boulder-lined section of the River Tees.

All in all, the day’s walk had been one of JoGLE’s most scenic, exhilarating, and satisfying so far. And, to cap it all, we arrived at the hostel to find a freshly baked Victoria sponge cake sitting on the kitchen counter-top, alongside a notice reading, ‘HELP YOURSELF’.

We later found out that it had been baked by the mother of one of the hostel staff, for no other reason than to spread a little happiness.

God bless her.

The journey from Langdon Beck to
Baldersdale
was just fifteen miles long, but it felt like fifty.

It began innocuously enough with a gentle walk along the River Tees past two sets of waterfalls: the modest but pretty Low Force, where the river drops eighteen feet along a series of shallow steps, and the anything-but-modest High Force, where the river plunges noisily and spectacularly over a seventy-one-feet precipice.

We stopped for lunch at the small market town of Middleton-in-Teesdale, somehow resisting the lure of the cafés and teashops, and making do with crisps and pre-packaged sandwiches from the Co-op instead. And from there, we set off, first across Harter Fell and then across Mickleton Moor, to Baldersdale.

In theory, this should have been a straightforward jaunt across undulating moorland and rough pasture. But, in ­practice, it turned out to be a long and bitter battle against the wind.

A five-minute walk into a strong wind is bracing. A thirty-­minute walk into a strong wind is tiring. But a three-hour walk into a strong wind is
bloody exhausting
.

Our original plan had been to walk four or five miles past the valley of Baldersdale to the village of Bowes. But the wind had sapped our energy and impeded our progress so much that we were glad to hole up for the evening at Baldersdale, in a bunkhouse at the remote Clove Lodge Cottage.

Wendy and I had the six-bedded bunkhouse at Clove Lodge, with its kitchen, lounge, dining area, toilet, and shower, to ourselves. It was lovely.

After cooking and eating dinner, we settled ourselves into comfy chairs in front of the wood-burning stove, gazed into the fire flames, and cared not a fig for the wind howling across the dark moors outside.

It was around this time that a curious thing happened to me. I began, against all of my expectations, to take pleasure in the problems and challenges of the trail.

Don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t derive immediate enjoyment from picking my way across marshes, blundering through mists and gales, or slithering, rain-soaked, across slippery rocks. But I did take pleasure in pitting myself against these obstacles, day after day, and overcoming them.

In the past, the walks I always enjoyed best were what I call ‘teashop’ walks: pleasant ambles through summer glades with pubs and cafés to break the monotony. So I was taken by surprise to discover that the Pennine Way, with its myriad pitfalls and privations, had become the most enjoyable part of JoGLE so far.

From somewhere in the depths of my mind, a half-remembered quote from the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl resurfaced. I checked it out on Google and found that it comes from his book
Man’s Search for Meaning
, and that it goes like this: ‘What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.’

Frankl was the founder of
logotherapy
: a form of psychotherapy based on his belief that the striving for meaning is the most powerful and motivating force in human life, and that a sense of purpose is essential to mental wellbeing.

He acquired these beliefs partly as a result of his observations and experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps in WWII, and partly as a result of his psychiatric practice later in life.

In the concentration camps, he observed that those prisoners who held onto a sense of meaning amidst their suffering were more likely to survive than those who did not. And in his psychiatric practice, he noticed that what was missing, above all else, in the lives of many depressed and suicidal men and women was a sense of purpose: a goal or cause to which they could dedicate themselves wholeheartedly.

Frankl held that without a deeply felt sense of purpose even the most comfortable lives can feel sad and empty, and with such a sense of purpose even the most outwardly wretched lives can feel worthwhile.

‘Those who have a “why” to live,’ he said, quoting Nietzsche, ‘can bear almost any “how”.’

The precise nature of this ‘why’ varies from individual to individual. Life’s meaning can be found in raising a family, creating a work of art, advancing the cause of science, excelling at sport, serving the community, achieving financial success, or communing with nature. The essential thing, as far as mental wellbeing is concerned, is that the individual is committed to some freely chosen goal that is replete with meaning for him- or herself.

Of course, the pursuit of any worthwhile goal brings with it some tension. Nothing meaningful is ever achieved without a struggle. But, according to Frankl, such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of psychological wellbeing.

He writes: ‘Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish.’

Frankl’s ideas summed up precisely how I was beginning to feel about JoGLE.

Had JoGLE been nothing but a succession of teashop walks, it would have been easy, it would have been comfortable, and it would have been horribly dull. But, instead, it had turned out to be difficult and challenging. And that’s what made it interesting and worthwhile.