Gorgeousness & gorgeosity made flesh!

There are moments in life so thankfully rare, so exquisite you can hardly breathe. Time slowly slows and then just as slowly stops and everything, absolutely everything else disappears. The birth of one’s first child, I would imagine. The first night of your honeymoon. The Red Sox winning the World Series for the first time in four generations. I’m having one of those timeless moments right now – right this second. I don’t usually write in real time – it reads too much like a journal. But right now, this infinite nanosecond deserves nothing less. There’s no other way.

I’m sitting on the bow of a boat aptly named Serenity, cruising down the Yangtze, through the Wu Gorge – the second of the three that precede the (in)famous and monstrously impressive dam the Chinese have been building for the last fifteen years. It’s the largest engineering project in China since the Great Wall, arguably the world’s most ambitious project in living memory and rumour has it the 600 km-long lake which is creeping up behind it will measurably affect the earth’s rotation.

Whether or not that morsel of internet trivia is true, what beauty! What splendour! Words, of course, can never paint the picture you want to describe a scene. A much more skilled writer than me would despair. It’s hopeless. The Yangtze, hundreds of metres wide for most of this journey from Chongqing so far, has narrowed here to barely five ship-widths. The walls of the river for the last two days have gently climbed to the sky, dotted with ramshackle houses, forests and tiered paddies. But as we enter the gorge they morph to towering sheer cliffs which roll and straddle and jut in and out of the water. The thick air and low visibility that gives much of China a Dickensian and lung-cloggy gloom instead makes this vast canyon otherwordly. Here, it’s not smog but a foggy mist which hangs in the air, but not like the fog of a cold morning. It’s a microclimate created by the dam itself. It’s as if the air is laced with cotton, as though you can reach out and grasp it with numb fingers and it shrouds the mountains and the river lending a cold cotton-wool cover to the diagonal silhouettes approaching from the horizon. It’s like in the movies when there’s a flashback and you get the blinding, solarised effect as the protagonist jumps back to a lost memory. This place, here right now: it just doesn’t feel real.


It’s not even particularly bright out here on the bow where I’m perched, rugged up with laptop and iPod. Pink Floyd’s Great Gig in the Sky just perfectly came on the leave-me-to-my-thoughts playlist and it has the angelic Clare Torry screaming wordlessly the ethereal soprano line and it feels like her voice is ricocheting around the walls of the canyon. Even iTunes is conspiring to soundtrack this lovely instant. But though it's not bright, I’m squinting anyway; the pale cotton-mist reflects what little sunlight is making its way down into the gorge, bouncing it off the flat walls and the mirror-flat water and off the white painted signs thirty metres up the cliff walls which designate to where the river will fill, once the three gorges project is complete.

Man is so ambitious, so capable, so frighteningly adept he can choose to take something as unimaginably vast as these canyons – which run for tens and tens of kilometres – and make them smaller. He can build a dam so massive it raises the water level one hundred metres for hundreds of kilometres on the third longest river in the world, drowning whole cities in the process. I was thinking last evening, if one chooses a single word to describe humanity, would would it be? Some would say “evil”, some “consciousness”, others “conscience", some probably “love”, some “evolution”. For me, it’s “ambition”. The history of our species – especially from the Renaissance to the present – is, I think, a tale of tireless drive and energy, of exponential change for better and worse. This isn’t an original or interesting thought. I just feel moved to explain: once you pass slowly through this stupendous, utterly magnificent gorge, bewildered, left wordless by its beauty and scale, and then you see painted way, way up its edge, “175m” (the eventual water line above sea level) you can no longer be sure of what’s the more astonishing truth: that a godless universe could just randomly marry our visual senses to such physical wonder, or that humankind can now casually modify that wonder with nothing more than money, political will and labour.

It’s phantasmagoric in this oriental valley, oh, gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh! The scent of the forests and some smoke hanging in the air from a fire someplace near. The air even tastes soft on the tongue, like candyfloss. It’s bitterly cold, but better for it. Makes the trip more of a voyage; more intrepid. Squinting across the bow, I count eight mountains lined up from closest to farthest – and going away each a slightly lighter tint of soft, misted grey, as if they’ve all been grabbed and scrunched up to the horizon. Which I suppose – tectonically speaking – is true.

These moments come about so seldom. There’s so much beauty in the world but we get to properly see it so seldom and even when we do see it, we don’t experience it, we don’t feel it. Well, right now, this stopped moment, I’m feeling it and I wish everyone I care about could feel it too. Traveling the earth, ticking off your own list of the wonders of the world means you can collect these moments in a locket kept pressed tight to your chest. They’re yours for always – nobody can ever take them away. And whenever times are hard, whenever you’re against the wall and when life’s quotidian drabness stomps on your soul, you can take a slow deep breath, close your eyes and stop the clock in your mind, taking yourself back to one of those handful of exquisite moments life can afford, when there is nothing else there, nothing at all, but you.