גם זה יעבור
Talking to me about Kim Keever’s stunning landscapes (posted by Bunnynico a few days ago), my mother mentioned that she hadn’t liked landscape painting until later in her life. Among her many favorites is Frederic Church, whose estate was near my old college; we visited it on one of her periodic trips (the purpose of which was to put me back together again).
I have lately been fond of landscapes, too, both in art and in reality. Our trip to Oregon was, for me, above all a succession of vistas and panoramas, and not merely because I was photographically mediating the experience. In June of 2007, I posted some photos from a ranch trip and wrote:
I’m learning, slowly, that I’m happier alone, far away from the various social and technological stimuli I stupidly seek in cities, happier when constantly reminded by nature of geologic, centurial, and seasonal time. Those scales, which so dwarf the emotional cycles of my scattered psyche, are calming, reassuring: moods are small things.
In his book Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton makes a similar observation about the capacity ruins and landscapes have to remind us of our relative scale, and the scale of our problems. That landscape painting often includes ruins is thematically resonant: as forests reclaim castles and mountains tower over abandoned cities, we are forced to reconsider our vanity, our self-importance, the primacy of our values and quarrels and concerns.
We make our way timidly downstream past all the grandiose dreams of our forbears, now so much rubble: look where we are! In the shade beneath a tree, which reaches straight for the sun, however lovely our art or awful our wars.
Landscapes are a rebuke to anthropocentrism. I always thought there was something apocalyptic in philosopher Richard Rorty’s relativist assertion: “There is no truth without sentences,” he said, because the word truth would not exist. It is prima facie evident, but one cannot evaluate it without imagining a world without speakers: without us.
I see no reason to doubt that such a world could come to pass; envision the apocalyptic agent of your political or aesthetic preference. Nevertheless, in that dark vision there is some comfort: just as watching vines reclaim ruins reminds us not to worry so much about the quotidian material details of our lives, so remembering that there was a time before us and could be a time after us affords some measure of calm to me.
In a world without sentences, there is no truth; there is also no falsity.
More personally, Ackb mentioned that for her, the hardest part of suffering is the sense that it will be endless; I replied that in times of despairing extremity, I sometimes repeat to myself again and again that “this, too, shall pass.”
Everything does. We might take every ruin as a tragedy, every death as a disaster, every unpopulated landscape as vision of loneliness. But we don’t, not purely: there is some solace to be found in the fact that there are broader scales of time than our own, even if they annihilate us by their immensity.
