Geoff Wisner

Landscape and Memory

by Simon Schama; Alfred A. Knopf; 1995; $40; 652 p., illustrated

Although it has much to say about forests, rivers, and mountains, Landscape and Memory, the monumental new book by Simon Schama, is not so much a work of "nature writing" as it is a cultural history. Schama's main concern is with the fears, desires, myths, and religious concepts that shape our reactions to nature and turn it into the human category of landscape. "Before it can ever be a repose for the senses," he writes, "landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock."

In each of the three main sections of the book -- "Wood," "Water," and "Stone" -- Schama shows how the human imagination has romanticized or demonized nature. His examples, bolstered by dozens of reproductions of engravings, photographs, and landscape paintings, are intriguing even when somewhat arbitrary. We learn how Yosemite and the redwood forests became quasireligious, quasipatriotic shrines, and how the ancient scheme to carve Mount Athos into the form of a man inspired Gutzon Borglum, relentless self-promoter and Klansman, to create the monument at Mount Rushmore. Schama's erudition ranges from Robin Hood to Bernini to the modern German painter Anselm Kiefer, and he is a sensitive interpreter of visual as well as written evidence, able to draw out the nuances of a painting or sculpture in the light of its own time.

Yet Schama is not entirely at home in the outdoors, as certain details reveal. He describes the peasants hired as guides for an early ascent of Mont Blanc as "skeptical" because they carried candles and tinder with them in case they had to spend a night on the mountain. "Prudent" might be a better word. He alludes flippantly to the fear of Father Fabri, who navigated the Nile in 1483, that "wallowing hippos" would "attack their boats and devour the passengers in their slick, pink maws." Fear of hippos is well justified, as Africans and travelers in Africa know. Still, Schama's journey to the Polish forest, described early in the book, proves that he is not content to reach all his conclusions in the library, and inspires some vivid, though densely worked, description:

Much of the woods lie under water. Fallen trunks lying across the course of streams create black ponds, twenty feet deep, and odorous peat-swamps filled with frogs and thunderfish and covered with a gray coating of algae from which, during spring and summer, blades of iris and marsh marigold sprout, like tufts of hair on a bald man's pate.

In the end, Landscape and Memory seems to imply that everything is landscape. While Bill McKibben's The End of Nature concluded with anguish that human beings have changed the environment so profoundly that even our weather is artificial, Schama takes this same idea as a calmly accepted starting point. Maintaining that people have been altering natural ecosystems "since the days of ancient Mesopotamia," he holds that "it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have."

The quotation from Thoreau that Schama chooses to begin and end the book seems intended to make that point. Thoreau writes, "It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream." Schama appears to interpret this as meaning that wildness is always qualified, that the earth has been domesticated. But Thoreau, though he located himself on the margin between town and forest, recognized that raw wilderness still existed. You can see this in the wariness that pervades his book The Maine Woods, in particular his deranged-sounding description of the harsh rock summit of Mount Katahdin. If Landscape and Memory is sometimes unsatisfying, it is because the author seems more interested in manicured Arcadias and ornamental fountains than in serious wilderness.

Published in Wild Earth, Summer 1996.



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Geoff Wisner Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama; Alfred A. Knopf; 1995; $40; 652 p., illustrated Although it has much to say about forests, rivers, and mountains, Landscape and Memory, the monumental new book by Simon Schama, is not so much a work of "nature writing" as it is a cultural history. Schama's main concern is with the fears, desires, myths, and religious concepts that shape our reactions to nature and turn it into the human category of landscape. "Before it can ever be a repose for the senses," he writes, "landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock." In each of the three main sections of the book -- "Wood," "Water," and "Stone" -- Schama shows how the human imagination has romanticized or demonized nature. His examples, bolstered by dozens of reproductions of engravings, photographs, and landscape paintings, are intriguing even when somewhat arbitrary. We learn how Yosemite and the redwood forests became quasireligious, quasipatriotic shrines, and how the ancient scheme to carve Mount Athos into the form of a man inspired Gutzon Borglum, relentless self-promoter and Klansman, to create the monument at Mount Rushmore. Schama's erudition ranges from Robin Hood to Bernini to the modern German painter Anselm Kiefer, and he is a sensitive interpreter of visual as well as written evidence, able to draw out the nuances of a painting or sculpture in the light of its own time. Yet Schama is not entirely at home in the outdoors, as certain details reveal. He describes the peasants hired as guides for an early ascent of Mont Blanc as "skeptical" because they carried candles and tinder with them in case they had to spend a night on the mountain. "Prudent" might be a better word. He alludes flippantly to the fear of Father Fabri, who navigated the Nile in 1483, that "wallowing hippos" would "attack their boats and devour the passengers in their slick, pink maws." Fear of hippos is well justified, as Africans and travelers in Africa know. Still, Schama's journey to the Polish forest, described early in the book, proves that he is not content to reach all his conclusions in the library, and inspires some vivid, though densely worked, description: Much of the woods lie under water. Fallen trunks lying across the course of streams create black ponds, twenty feet deep, and odorous peat-swamps filled with frogs and thunderfish and covered with a gray coating of algae from which, during spring and summer, blades of iris and marsh marigold sprout, like tufts of hair on a bald man's pate. In the end, Landscape and Memory seems to imply that everything is landscape. While Bill McKibben's The End of Nature concluded with anguish that human beings have changed the environment so profoundly that even our weather is artificial, Schama takes this same idea as a calmly accepted starting point. Maintaining that people have been altering natural ecosystems "since the days of ancient Mesopotamia," he holds that "it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have." The quotation from Thoreau that Schama chooses to begin and end the book seems intended to make that point. Thoreau writes, "It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream." Schama appears to interpret this as meaning that wildness is always qualified, that the earth has been domesticated. But Thoreau, though he located himself on the margin between town and forest, recognized that raw wilderness still existed. You can see this in the wariness that pervades his book The Maine Woods, in particular his deranged-sounding description of the harsh rock summit of Mount Katahdin. If Landscape and Memory is sometimes unsatisfying, it is because the author seems more interested in manicured Arcadias and ornamental fountains than in serious wilderness. Published in Wild Earth, Summer 1996.