What is extraordinary about being on a mountain summit (at least in good weather) is that you can see different seasons, different countries, and sometimes even the curvature of the earth. You view hundreds of miles in all directions: you occupy a panoptical point, really. This is both an egotistical and a quashing experience: you see backwards in time, outwards in space, and are both uplifted and diminished by that experience. For whatever reason, that mixture of self-celebration and self-obliteration, which is a version of the pain-pleasure mixture of the sublime, is incredibly compelling.

~ Robert Macfarlane

John Ruskin, The Glacier des Bois, 1843.

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