ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 07 AUGUST 2025
On July 7th of 2025, I arrived in New Hampshire for a week-long vacation, cozied by the White Mountains. I really needed it. In November of 2024, I had a shorter vacation in Tennessee, and I wanted to recapture the unbridled happiness I felt in that escape. A much needed break from my, honestly, miserable and isolated day-to-day.
I had a dry excitement for the trip since it was first proposed to me by my grandmother, who accompanied me, which became a very prominent excitement the closer time dragged itself to the date of departure (I’m not sure why my emotions work like that). It took us two days to make it to our cabin: day one took us to a hotel in Connecticut, and day two finally to where we stayed for the next handful of days.
Nothing could have prepared me for the mess of emotions and thoughts and tears and scribbled words and questions and confusion and frustration and unsettled calm that New England gave me. There’s a lot I would love to talk about that I either am unable to, refuse to, or can’t exactly put into words yet, but for now, those thoughts lie silent in me. Here, however, are some thoughts I’ve let escape from me.
I took a short adventure to Mount Washington during the trip.
My ticket boarded me onto a small cramped train. Once all passengers were secure in their seats, it began to climb; its face tilted skyward as it diligently followed the railway. The growing remains of its fuel billowed from its backside, assaulting the senses of whoever its smell hit. “We have reached our top speed of five miles per hour!” the conductor called between his rambles about the mountain and her friend we were all so honored to sit within. I stared through the window next to me and tried to take in all it would allow me to see: out, out towards the mountains and cliffs, and past the cliffs.
Phrases from the conductor spilled every now and then into my brain, telling tales of the danger of this mountain. To most it would be disturbing, but the cliffs felt friendly wearing deathly faces. It’s as if the mountain still had her autonomy; her pick of who stands and who falls. But that was only a façade.
We arrived on the summit, or more accurately, the corpse of it. Man had come and conquered. What replaced the mountain’s brow was an elaborate concrete structure, patches of specifically assembled rock, and an insulated commercial area fit with food and souvenirs. Like many things, I had no strong emotional reaction, but instead a depression born of distaste. This was it: the legendary Mount Washington… so they said. I did indeed find Mount Washington there, but I did not find the mountain in which man branded that name onto. She drowned under the weight of civilization.
I let myself wander while waiting for our scheduled leaving time. My legs eventually carried me to a spot where I could be alone with her. It almost had this supernatural quality: whereas everywhere else was the invasive babble of tourists, here the voices were distant, and sometimes forgotten. I sat on the artificial rock barrier separating the path from the natural beauty, and looked out to see what could have been Mount Washington’s virgin form, and her sisters peaking through the fog, all exhibiting their own majesty.
I don’t remember how long I sat there but the conversation I had with her lasted her whole time sitting here, in this spot, on this continent, on this planet, hidden away in the texture of the universe. She gathered more fog around us, first to let me focus on her, and second to spite the mass of stomping feet not far from us, scrambling to open their phone cameras to find the perfect shot for their Instagram. She weaved into me a tale that couldn’t be put into words. And as it finished, her spirit vanished back into the mist that rolled across the rocks. Her final gift to me was calm. I had not the energy to cry, or to yell, or to think very much at all. If I was to do anything in that moment rather than to sit in her peaceful silence, it was to cross the artificial barrier and embrace her corpse to the fullest extent I still could. But the train whistle screeched, and ripped me away from the heavens, and sent me back to the civilization I was now certain to dread.
It was a small wooden building tucked behind the rows of similarly wooden businesses. You couldn’t even see the building itself when approaching it; only the sign was there to notify you of its existence. We decided to pay a visit.
The exterior and interior had a discordant aesthetic clash. While on the outside it had the colonial architecture of its neighbors, the inside flourished with the trends of modernity. Bright, simple colors lined each shelf, some (the most profitable, one could assume) turned towards the passerbys; given the better chance at seizing eyes. I wandered in the bookstore aimlessly, just lending my attention to the scenery around me. It was small, however, and I’d collected all the sights within a few minutes. At the entrance was a shelf of books themed around the locale for tourists to violate their budget with, then classics on the left dressed as either modern books or marketable antiques. Into the corridor on the right was the meat of the store: a sizeable collection of fiction, half placed there by publishers and the other half placed there by social media marketing. Then the cousins of such books sat next to them: non-fictions of the accepted histories and discourses of the day. It was no surprise to me, but still tuned me into awareness of my position as an outsider. Despite most of my reading being of non-fiction, these titles pulled no interest out of me. It was merely a gestalt of noise; pointless noise; waste. And all were to be promptly wiped away by the end of the decade, and replaced by the newest noise. Everything would happen, but nothing would change.
I did end up buying a book[1]. It was a compilation of Franz Kafka stories, wearing the least offensively simple cover I could find.
A few weeks after the trip I examined the inside of the cover, looking for what the painting depicted on it was called. Instead of that, I found this poor book’s marks of Cain; of modernity. It almost gave me empathy for the object, as one would give empathy to a newborn with deformities. What misery is it to be manufactured into this world, and to be branded in the style of those removed of beauty?
I didn’t find what the painting was called. All I found was a note that it was from a private collection, and then a notice above that: “These works were first published in the early twentieth century and reflect the attitudes of their time. The publisher’s decision to present them as originally published is not intended as endorsement of any offensive cultural representations of language.”
There is a certain style that has strangled literature, and all art. Maybe through this story you were able to come to a similar conclusion. On the surface level, it’s an easy frustration of the plights of capitalism, marketing, monetary exchange—but with all things, it’s deeper. What can be deciphered of the appealization of art? Isn’t the art of the masses’ appeal a betrayal of what art should be, if it should be anything? There is a grey mean that has been reached with the profitable and accepted arts: not beautiful, not horrifying. For both things, beauty and horror, inspire something greater than the average; something unmarketable, unpublishable, unacceptable, and dangerous[2].
Many reject aesthetic as an important discourse, but they are mistaken. It’s through aesthetic that the state of things, whatever it must be, is most intimately formulated. An aesthetic of grey-beige, of the abstractly uncreative and uncreative abstracts, is the aesthetic that tears a soul from a body, and throws it into the junkyard. There is a sort of boring gloom that hangs over the current times, that presents itself as solid colors and inoffensive shapes. All that was once beautiful, if it is to be carried into the modern age as was done with the painting on the book’s cover, is to be regarded as antique; commodity.
It will take me a while before I can make another trip to a bookstore.
For the whole vacation, I impromptu gave myself a policy of never photographing the most beautiful sights. I wanted to practice Being, however difficult it may be to Be today. The photograph above, however, has a particular importance outside of the usually mentality of keeping a memory. It was an attempt at not photographing what was there, but what I was thinking.
Despite the majesty of the coast before me, there keeping me from it was a cable fence. I could have very easy jumped over the fence, yes, but I prefer not to scuffle with police unnecessarily, and neither did I have the means to independently scale the cliff face. To say the least, it was disheartening. And if the trip to Mount Washington wasn’t enough to push me towards being in humanity’s opposition, it was this that did.
A scenario in my head repeated itself for the remainder of my time in New England, and continues to this day: what if by some miracle, all of man’s affects on the Earth were reversed, and all of humanity was removed from the planet but me? If I had the choice to push a magic button and have such a fantasy become reality, I am still unsure whether or not I would. I, of course, have friends here in humanity’s great chamber for itself, and am hesitant to lose any. But what of the alternative in this scenario? I would be free in the truest sense. At least, free from civilization. I could be closer with Earth, and not ripped from it by the social body, by concrete, by asphalt, by steel, by a dammed cable fence. We are still animals, aren’t we? After all these millennia of wanting to be greater than the Simple Animal, we are no fundamentally different from it. And if the Earth to be free from civilization, then I, the Simple Animal, could reunite with Mother; embrace itself. The freedom would no longer be personal, but a freedom for the Earth herself.
Man has trapped the Simple Animal in complexes of fences and cages, and yet in his infinite arrogance, he fails to see that he has also trapped himself[3]. And behind his own cable fence, or artificial barrier, there is Beauty, waiting to be embraced. There is a rocky shore to be climbed onto, and walked across; there are waves to feel crashing against your naked skin. There are landscapes to Be in, and to look out onto, and to experience without words or photographs. Since the first king thrusted his sword and declared his victim an outlaw, man has used his conscious not to Be, but to deceive himself; and just as the Earth erodes her body with infinite dark waters, destroy himself.
Words formed in my head as the train carried me from the summit of Mount Washington back to her base; a poem. And I vigorously tried to keep those words flowing in my head until I could write them down. Once I got back to my cabin, I grabbed a notebook and pencil, and quickly scribbled the following:
Steel and concrete lay upon your sacred summit,
harboring the rabble and rash of tourists.
Up the slope climbs the beasts of smoke;
plumes choking your virgin face.
I am huddled among them,
but I promise, I am not one of them,
and you understand that,
don't you?
My feet one day shall ache for your beauty
if my poisonous duties allow.
And if justice were ever exacted upon your proud peak
its blemishes would be swept by the winds,
and I would visit your pure form;
nothing to interrupt the whispers of the air
carrying wisps of mist 'cross the rocks,
through the impressive valleys.
Perhaps there will be a day your domain is unshackled;
your name blown away in time's hurricane,
and you sit among your sisters:
naked, and ancient, and beautiful, and free.
Long may you live, Mount Washington.
A month later, I still find myself dazed and uncertain. But it doesn’t matter. I do not live in the fantasy where humanity’s impressions can be wiped from the universe; I live here. And I will Live.
I miss you, beautiful New England. Your perfect form; your imperfect form. Maybe one day, we will meet again.
1.
A certain person quite close to me (you know who you are) calls me a fetishist for physical books. I guess I couldn’t help myself.
2.
On a personal note: this is why horror is beautiful to me, and beauty is similarly horrifying.
3.
What is to become of his self-domestication is a later discussion.