Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.

I spent the weekend hiking in Kentucky with my friends. We were in Red River Gorge, where the views are absolutely phenomenal. This is an annual trip and it's always one of the highlights of my year. I had a mustache incidentally because last year, everyone shaved their beards into a mustache, but this year, only I did so I looked like a weirdo; As opposed to last year, when we were just five mustachioed guys walking through the woods, which didn't look weird at all.

Red River Gorge is just stupidly beautiful. There are mountains and cliffs and all kinds of adventure, from scrambling up rock faces to walking through creek beds, and most of all, there are views. It's a funny word—view. A view is what you're giving this video, of course. It's also what you can see at any given moment. Anyone who can see and has their eyes open has a view. As you're watching me, my view is of a panoramic scene of the valleys below and the ridges in the distance, but as I'm recording these words, I'm back home, so my view is of an unmade bed, a Catherine Murphy painting, and a window into the gray Indiana winter. I always have a view, but the idea of great views is that you're aware that you have a view. You're seeing the world in a way that feels new or vast or visually overwhelming. You're viewing something great and a little scary, which is how Rudolf Otto described the sacred—the mysterium tremendum—he called it.

A great view is supposed to evoke the tremendous mystery, but it never quite worked for me. Like, I remember once in college, I drove across the country with my friends Ransom and Kathy to visit the Grand Canyon; And we watched at dawn as the sun rose and the shadows crept down the canyon wall, and I just wasn't that impressed. Like, don't get me wrong. It's a grand canyon. I'm not deeply versed in canyon lore, but I imagine that the Grand Canyon is probably an absolutely world-class top of its field kind of canyon, but for me, personally, at the age of 20, having driven 1,800 miles to see this great wonder of the world, it felt a little underwhelming.

In the end, I'm not sure that I'm a views kind of person. Maybe because I don't have a particularly vivid visual imagination and maybe because I have a rather intense fear of heights, and amount of height is sometimes correlated with quality of view. Like, Red River Gorge is one of those aggressively beautiful places where the wonder shouts from the mountaintops and natural stone arches, and I do love it, but of course, I'm not really there for the views and what I love about it isn't really what I can see. I am there for the togetherness, for the feeling that my life is bound up in these other lives, for the stories we've told and retold to each other for over a decade now, for the making and recalling of shared memories. I do not get the feeling of mysterium tremendum from the views, but instead from the feeling of interconnectedness, not just to my friends, but also to the ground we trod. For me, the wonder is in every footfall and every pine tree. What an astonishment it is to be not just with beauty or with nature, but to be at all. What a wonder that we get to be here for a little while.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.