723
One can hopelessly argue over the efficacy of these numbers, the criteria bordering efficacy, or the protective shields they actually imply. Ultimately, one either gets
along with other human neighbors, or does not. Concepts of white picket fences,
handrails, barbwire, a projected 100,000–156,666 kilometers of new roads built per
year during the coming three decades, and “Keep Out” and “No Trespassing” signs
are a queasy aggregate of impacts that comes down to massive trends of urban,
rural, countryside, and wild. Remote, inaccessible, inhospitable. Versus teeming,
density, megacity, conurbations, Metropolitan Statistical Areas, urban clusters. All
have their linguistic roles to play in the contemplations that have absorbed our kind
since the earliest archaeological records. So persuasive are these words that, according to the Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at Harvard University,
John R. Stilgoe, a book like Julian Tennyson’s 1939 Suffolk Scene: A Book of
Description and Adventure “detailing why [John] Constable painted in certain spots
that still satisfied and delighted Englishmen… became important in World War II,
for they helped explain why Britons fought”.
3
How different a case for motivation than that exhibited in the person of desert
explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who concluded his masterpiece, Arabian Sands, with the
simple statement of fact: “Although I had no political or economic interest in the
country, few people accepted the fact that I travelled there for my own pleasure,
certainly not the American oil companies nor the Saudi Government….I realized
that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had
found contentment, were doomed”.
4
And the combining of these aesthetic reveries,
social anxieties, and stark geopolitical contests has not infrequently, from country
to country, resulted in such triumphs of unexpected remorse, nostalgia, and amalgamated naturalistic obscurity as was occasioned on the final remark by Washington
Irving, in his renowned 1819 short-story “…and the plough-boy, loitering homeward of a still summer evening, has often fancied his voice at a distance, chanting a
melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow”.
5
In ancient China, that sleepy obscurity, the arcane recollections of what might
easily be characterized as a landscape gene, was chiefly espoused by neo-Daoism,
particularly He Yan (207–249) of China’s Three Kingdoms Period. He promoted the
notion of wu, the collective energies of yin and yang whose dialectic emerged brilliantly out of the obscurity of all human and natural origins, and the school of
Xuanxue, which famously synthesized its principles. It was also Yan who was long
credited with overseeing the most comprehensive exegesis of the Analects of
Confucius,
6
that penultimate cultivation of ethics, whether in the countryside or city.
A thorough examination of ecological reciprocity (Fig. 80.2).
3 What Is Landscape? by John R. Stilgoe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
Mass., 2015, p. 209.
4 Arabian Sands, Longmans, Green And Co LTD, London 1959, p. 310.
5 Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, With Fifty-Three Illustrations by George
H. Boughton, Macmillan And Co., London and New York, 1893, p. 215.
6 See “Embodying Nothingness and the Ideal of the Affectless Sage in Daoist Philosophy,” in
Nothingness in Asian Philosophy, JeeLoo Liu and Douglas L. Berger, eds. New York and Oxon:
Routledge, 2014, pp. 213–229.
80.1 Obscurity and Redemptive Intuition
One can hopelessly argue over the efficacy of these numbers, the criteria bordering efficacy, or the protective shields they actually imply. Ultimately, one either gets
along with other human neighbors, or does not. Concepts of white picket fences,
handrails, barbwire, a projected 100,000–156,666 kilometers of new roads built per
year during the coming three decades, and “Keep Out” and “No Trespassing” signs
are a queasy aggregate of impacts that comes down to massive trends of urban,
rural, countryside, and wild. Remote, inaccessible, inhospitable. Versus teeming,
density, megacity, conurbations, Metropolitan Statistical Areas, urban clusters. All
have their linguistic roles to play in the contemplations that have absorbed our kind
since the earliest archaeological records. So persuasive are these words that, according to the Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape at Harvard University,
John R. Stilgoe, a book like Julian Tennyson’s 1939 Suffolk Scene: A Book of
Description and Adventure “detailing why [John] Constable painted in certain spots
that still satisfied and delighted Englishmen… became important in World War II,
for they helped explain why Britons fought”.
3
How different a case for motivation than that exhibited in the person of desert
explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who concluded his masterpiece, Arabian Sands, with the
simple statement of fact: “Although I had no political or economic interest in the
country, few people accepted the fact that I travelled there for my own pleasure,
certainly not the American oil companies nor the Saudi Government….I realized
that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had
found contentment, were doomed”.
4
And the combining of these aesthetic reveries,
social anxieties, and stark geopolitical contests has not infrequently, from country
to country, resulted in such triumphs of unexpected remorse, nostalgia, and amalgamated naturalistic obscurity as was occasioned on the final remark by Washington
Irving, in his renowned 1819 short-story “…and the plough-boy, loitering homeward of a still summer evening, has often fancied his voice at a distance, chanting a
melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow”.
5
In ancient China, that sleepy obscurity, the arcane recollections of what might
easily be characterized as a landscape gene, was chiefly espoused by neo-Daoism,
particularly He Yan (207–249) of China’s Three Kingdoms Period. He promoted the
notion of wu, the collective energies of yin and yang whose dialectic emerged brilliantly out of the obscurity of all human and natural origins, and the school of
Xuanxue, which famously synthesized its principles. It was also Yan who was long
credited with overseeing the most comprehensive exegesis of the Analects of
Confucius,
6
that penultimate cultivation of ethics, whether in the countryside or city.
A thorough examination of ecological reciprocity (Fig. 80.2).
3 What Is Landscape? by John R. Stilgoe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
Mass., 2015, p. 209.
4 Arabian Sands, Longmans, Green And Co LTD, London 1959, p. 310.
5 Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, With Fifty-Three Illustrations by George
H. Boughton, Macmillan And Co., London and New York, 1893, p. 215.
6 See “Embodying Nothingness and the Ideal of the Affectless Sage in Daoist Philosophy,” in
Nothingness in Asian Philosophy, JeeLoo Liu and Douglas L. Berger, eds. New York and Oxon:
Routledge, 2014, pp. 213–229.
80.1 Obscurity and Redemptive Intuition