On Landscape

[Vincent Brady]

John O'Donohue Irish poet and scholar says " Landscape is not all external it has crept inside the soul". To think like this can make us one with the landscape and not not mere observers of it.

-TEX

 

[eddym]

Well, I guess when you think about it, we're all going to end up as part of it anyway.

 

[bythewei]

and if you think one step further, the immediate environment combines with lighting and other elements like people, evokes a certain kind of emotions which is unique to different places.

it probaly is right to say then, that it crepes into our soul.

 

[lxdude]

it probaly is right to say then, that it crepes into our soul.

OOooo, I like crepes!

 

[coigach]

Here's two quotes that have influenced my thinking on 'landscape':

“…we, personally, cumulatively, communally, create and recreate landscapes – a landscape being not just the terrain but also the human perspectives on it, the land plus its overburden of meanings.”

Tim Robinson, ‘Listening to the landscape’ in ‘Setting foot on the shores of Connemara & other writings’, 1996, Lilliput.



“…when we look at a landscape, we do not see what is there, but largely what we think is there. We attribute qualities to a landscape which it does not intrinsically possess – savageness, for example, or bleakness – and we value it accordingly. We read landscapes, in other words, we interpret their forms in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory. Although people have traditionally gone into wild places in some way to escape culture or convention, they have in fact perceived that wilderness, as just about everything is perceived, through a filter of associations….”

Robert Macfarlane, ‘Mountains of the mind – a History of a Fascination’, pp18-19, 2003 Granta

Cheers,
Gavin