If you’ve lived in a place with sweeping, wide vistas, you understand that objects can appear much closer than they actually are. Here in New Mexico, where the air is thin and dry, it’s not uncommon to see mountain peaks that are well over a hundred miles distant. From my living room, South Mountain looks like an easy walk, when it is really a good twenty miles away.
Charles Dickens experienced this when he visited the Alps in September of 1846. The individual mountain peaks were so large that they fooled the eye into believing they were much closer than they actually were. In his novel Little Dorrit, he begins Chapter 1 of Book 2 by describing this phenomena:
In the autumn of the year, Darkness and Night were creeping up to the highest ridges of the Alps. . . . The air had been warm and transparent through the whole of the bright day. Shining metal spires and church-roofs, distant and rarely seen, had sparkled in the view; and the snowy mountain-tops had been so clear that unaccustomed eyes, cancelling the intervening country, and slighting their rugged height for something fabulous, would have measured them as within a few hours’ easy reach. Mountain-peaks of great celebrity in the valleys, whence no trace of their existence was visible sometimes for months together, had been since morning plain and near in the blue sky. And now, when it was dark below, though they seemed solemnly to recede, like specters who were going to vanish, as the red dye of the sunset faded out of them and left them coldly white, they were yet distinctly defined in their loneliness, above the mists and shadows.
I think reading historical fiction can do the same thing for events long distant. As we read what it was like in long ago times, the events draw nearer to us, the people more real. We live and breathe the experience as if it were in our own time, and we realize that we are much closer to these ancient peoples than we believed.
Jennifer Bohnhoff is a former middle school and high school history and language arts teacher. She lives in the mountains of central New Mexico and write historical and contemporary fiction for middle grade through adult readers. She is available to lecture on the history behind her stories.
