The old Rothschild line about peaks and valleys being for amateurs parallels, and perhaps derives from a similar precept about happiness and unhappiness. (Which is distinct from pain and difficulty.) When things go up and down, when they agitate, they teach us that they exist. We perceive the territory. The question then becomes what they might be. Mountains teach us about the earth (despite the Victorian industrial rail travellers running down the curtains upon seeing them), and we then become aware of the prescence of the earth. The truth of the earth, though, isn't necessarily the mountains.
