Fingal’s Cave

I remember visiting the Taj Mahal as a boy. Perhaps the Taj Mahal in my mind was grander than it really was – as I had seen it on posters and calendars. I had imagined the white marble mausoleum melding into the gloaming, bathed in the golden glow of the full moon. But our visit was on a midsummer afternoon. In the sweltering heat, the seventh wonder of the world did not overly impress me. I was, in one word: underwhelmed.

There have been occasions when I have experienced the opposite. Visiting the Vatican in my youth, I was completely overwhelmed. Everything I had pictured was multiplied several times in real life – the grandeur of the Sistine Chapel, the exquisite Michelangelo paintings on its ceiling, the immensity of the grand Piazza San Pietro, where people gather for papal audiences – to cite only from memory, some forty years past.

My recent visit to see Fingal’s Cave on Staffa Island (Scotland) was similar to the Vatican experience – it exceeded my expectations by several orders of magnitude. A cave with a basaltic rock formation at its mouth was all I thought it would be. How could anyone be inspired to compose music by such a venue, I did wonder.

The trouble is, we rarely imagine concurrently with all our senses – instead, we think of a visual picture as in a photograph, deaf to the sounds. We ignore the feel of the sea under our boat, silence the surging waves crashing against the rocks. We do not think of the smell and taste of the salty spray as we take in the enormity of the natural rock formations in front of us, trying not to fall off our boat tossed violently about by the sea. If we could, we need not go anywhere but imagine everything for ourselves.

Perhaps there are people who conjure up such images complete with the five senses, and perhaps other ‘modern’ senses like equilibrioception (sense of orientation and movement) and proprioception (awareness of the location of our body parts). I am not one of them, but Felix Mendelssohn’s classical music composition ‘Fingal’s Cave’ makes me speculate he was one among this gifted ilk.

Mendelssohn composed the Fingal’s Cave Overture (The Hebrides, Opus 26), inspired by the echoes of the waves in the cave. Formed by the cooling and cracking of solidified lava from volcanic eruptions millions of years ago, the hexagonal basalt columns stand like silent sentinels on either side of the cave. They reassure me of the rich provenance of our beautiful planet. Our boat did not land due to the rough seas that prevailed; most tourists on board were seasick, but I was perversely glad not only for my seasoned sea legs but also because I had a reason to revisit Fingal’s Cave at a time when the sea is calmer.