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Landscape & Memory
by Simon Schama
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Opening a radically new and original path into history, Simon Schama explores the scenery of our Western culture, both real landscapes and landscapes of the mind that have given us our sense of homeland, the dark woods of our imagined origins. What unfolds is a series of compelling journeys through space and time: from the ancient woodland of Poland, a symbol over the centuries of national endurance, through the forest birthplace of the German psyche, to the Big Trees of Yosemite that gave a new nation its holy past. Through all of history, from pre-classical antiquity to the Third Reich and beyond, Schama uncovers the myths and memories that have stamped themselves on our most basic social instincts and institutions: territorial identity, the wild and domestic, mortality and immortality.
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"Books like Landscape & Memory came after I got interested but it was a book which expressed in black and white the hunch I had: it was there, laid out so beautifully, because Simon Schama has this talent for taking little stories and placing them in a broad context. I read it ages ago but the one chapter that has stayed with me most vividly is the one about mountains. He describes the journey humankind has taken in relation to their perception of mountains, which started as something really horrid and scary, so that in the early 18th century tourists who crossed the Alps drew their blinds to avoid seeing the horror of the mountains. They would literally blindfold themselves. Then in the later 18th century there’s the whole idea of the sublime, that you find God in the mountains as an awesome, glorious expression of God’s might. Then there’s the chapter on the Teutenwald, the idea of barbarian wilderness as viewed from the Roman world of classical order. When we look at the shift in the relationship between man and nature, that’s what really interests me. If you look at the medieval garden – the hortus conclusus – it shuts out the wilderness. The wilderness is something scary so you put up walls and create this very manicured little paradise and then with industrialisation and more people moving into the city, more people losing their direct relationship with nature, suddenly nature in its wildness becomes celebrated. So you have the ha-ha for example, where, instead of putting up a wall to protect your garden, you dig a ditch. You have the same security because the cattle can’t come in but you can look over the whole landscape: you invite the wilderness into the garden. And it’s a continuing process. In a very simplistic way you could see how people respond to threats to the environment by planting wild meadows in their gardens. I’ve found Landscape & Memory one of the most extraordinary books of cultural history I’ve ever read and it certainly seems to be one that has set all sorts of hares running."