Page 49 - Art First: Simon Morley: Lost Horizon
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e door to the invisible
, x x ,
is work is based on lines from René Daumal’s Mount Analogue:
A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures
in Mountain Climbing (1952) which casts a surrealist light on
humanity’s timeless quest for a perfect land, a perfect society.
It was the author’s final work and remained uncompleted due
to his premature death, and was published posthumously.
Mount Analogue suggests why such visions are so important,
despite their dangers. It tells the story of a group of intrepid
men and women who voyage to an unknown island in search
of an improbable mountain—the link between Heaven and
Earth. ‘Its summit must be inaccessible’, writes the narrator, who
is a member of the party, ‘but its base accessible to human beings
as nature made them. It must be unique and it must exist geo -
graph ically. e door to the invisible must be visible.’ By posing
such a conundrum—by imagining what both is and is not, and
by committing himself to the pursuit of the impossible—Daumal
catches a meaning behind all these Utopian quests.
