On entering France, on the way to Belgium...
October 22nd 2006 06:38
Old houses out of impressionist paintings, different coloured sky, orderly fields -- country tamed by centuries of use, amazingly flat land -- you can see for miles. So quaint, so suffocatingly isolated. Moving through the land in our little rarefied capsule, free from heat, cold, smells, on our neat 20th century highway. Old churches, differently coloured cows, differently shaped horses, different trees, different grasses…
But perhaps differences in themselves are infinitely less interesting than their effect -- what it’s like to experience the differences -- because people and their thoughts, words, feelings are the only worthwhile toys. Differences aren’t significant unless they hurt you, unless they make you feel something -- for instance, the feelings of dislocation or strangeness.
Notes
-- Tuesday 4 May 2010: Claude Levi-Strauss remarks (Tristes Tropiques, 1955, translation by John and Doreen Weightman, p 117): "We are unacqainted with virgin nature since our landscape is manifestly subservient to man. It may occasionally appear wild, not because it really is so, but because interaction has occurred at a slower rate... Only if one has travelled in America [or Australia!] does one realize that this sublime harmony, far from being a spontaneous manifestation of nature, is the result of agreements painstakingly evolved during a long collaboration between man and the landscape. Man naively admires the effects of his past achievements."
But perhaps differences in themselves are infinitely less interesting than their effect -- what it’s like to experience the differences -- because people and their thoughts, words, feelings are the only worthwhile toys. Differences aren’t significant unless they hurt you, unless they make you feel something -- for instance, the feelings of dislocation or strangeness.
***
Notes
-- Tuesday 4 May 2010: Claude Levi-Strauss remarks (Tristes Tropiques, 1955, translation by John and Doreen Weightman, p 117): "We are unacqainted with virgin nature since our landscape is manifestly subservient to man. It may occasionally appear wild, not because it really is so, but because interaction has occurred at a slower rate... Only if one has travelled in America [or Australia!] does one realize that this sublime harmony, far from being a spontaneous manifestation of nature, is the result of agreements painstakingly evolved during a long collaboration between man and the landscape. Man naively admires the effects of his past achievements."
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