Behold, My Eye.

Pretty Maps by Cope

Inherently, landscape is difficult to write about. Walden gets pretty close of capturing the majesty of nature (and the hermit lifestyle, thanks Thoreau.) Our reading, The Beholding Eye, by D.W. Meinig attempts to approach landscape in it's many forms. As nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place, and finally- aesthetic. 


But I have to be honest, Meinig sets out to describe, "some of the different ways our varied group might describe a common scene," (34) but does this in the most convoluted terms he could scrape up. It's a difficult reading to get through. Not only because of word choice, but because of his metaphors are a hyperbole and a half. This is not to diminish his points, which are well-thought out, just not articulated well for anyone as patient as the man he describes as, "minuscule, surfical, ephemeral, [and] subordinate" (34).


He begins by outlining the view of landscape as nature, a clear strike at the aforementioned Thoreau. Landscape is nostalgic and that we all secretly wish to remove our impact from the world around us to restore the beauty that is a natural state of Earth. He spends a few paragraphs, it seems, almost casting these people as hopeless romantics with no other motivation but wax and wane about what used to be. When it comes to landscape as artifact, man is the shaper of Earth, the planet just a stage for our furniture and follies. Man is both the creator and and conqueror- and this, seems to be more noble a role than the man obsessed with what nature used to be.


What I found most interesting about this reading, is landscape as aesthetic as it deals the closest with what we have approached in class. Especially his quote, "It rests upon the belied that there is something close to the essence, to beauty and truth, in the landscape. Landscape becomes a mystery holding meanings we strive to grasp but cannot reach," (46). I believe our class most closely reflects this idea as we seek to define a particular space of Islais in this midterm. We must balance between being the hopeless romantics of landscape and the conquerors of it.