"Nevertheless there are certain peaks, canons, and clear meadow spaces which are above all compassing of words, and have a certain fame as of the nobly great to whom we give no familiar names"
About this Quote
Austin is arguing for a kind of holy silence, and she does it by making language feel suddenly inadequate. The sentence starts with a concession - "Nevertheless" - as if she has been talking about the ways we name, map, and domesticate landscapes, then pivots to insist that some places refuse that treatment. "Peaks, canons, and clear meadow spaces" is a deliberately plain, almost inventory-like list, but it gathers force through its breadth: vertical, carved, and open terrain. She’s sketching a whole ecology of grandeur, not a single postcard view.
The key phrase is "above all compassing of words". It’s a subtle rebuke to the human impulse to possess by description. If you can wrap something in words, you can file it, sell it, make it familiar. Austin denies that closure. Her "fame" isn’t tourism hype; it’s reputation in the older sense, an aura that precedes you and disciplines your behavior. These places are "nobly great" the way certain people in a community are: respected at a distance, approached with manners.
That last clause is the sting: "to whom we give no familiar names". Naming is intimacy, but also conquest; think of the West’s boom in place-names that honored financiers, generals, and speculators. Austin, writing out of the American Southwest and an emerging conservation consciousness, resists that colonial habit. The subtext is ethical: some landscapes should stay partially unclaimed, not because they are empty, but because their power exceeds our right to narrate them into ownership.
The key phrase is "above all compassing of words". It’s a subtle rebuke to the human impulse to possess by description. If you can wrap something in words, you can file it, sell it, make it familiar. Austin denies that closure. Her "fame" isn’t tourism hype; it’s reputation in the older sense, an aura that precedes you and disciplines your behavior. These places are "nobly great" the way certain people in a community are: respected at a distance, approached with manners.
That last clause is the sting: "to whom we give no familiar names". Naming is intimacy, but also conquest; think of the West’s boom in place-names that honored financiers, generals, and speculators. Austin, writing out of the American Southwest and an emerging conservation consciousness, resists that colonial habit. The subtext is ethical: some landscapes should stay partially unclaimed, not because they are empty, but because their power exceeds our right to narrate them into ownership.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nature |
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