This article is taken from PN Review 280, Volume 51 Number 2, November - December 2024.
Re-Arranging the World
Spending a fair amount of time on my own, as I do, in the Highlands of Scotland, I discover in myself a mighty will to forge patterns. The landscape is empty here – from the windows at the back of the house I see hills, and to walk out is to walk into a view comprising only the river, strath and moorland that is spread beneath them. All is in shades of grey green, ochre, purple, dun. There is restraint, a pared back presentation of colour and detail and little in the way of interference with the great plainness of things, the utter simplicity of that which is laid out before me.
Then my eye adjusts; I start to see variety. Next thing, imagination has answered the appearance of a chastened landscape with the gift of its generative powers: so, for example, now here I am, at that same window, looking over, say, an eighteenth-entury English parkland. For that scattering of Highland birch trees down there on the flat could be, easily, in this particular light, on this day, a planting by Capability Brown of mighty oaks. Or, in the same way, I can see up there on the hill a set of classical ruins, the remains of a marble temple though made of a chunk of Sutherland rock… This is the sort of thing that goes on. The focus keeps re-aligning, the mind giving fresh readings of a cluster of wild flowers so that, on a long and lonely walk, these seem as intricate and brightly put together as a bouquet of raspberry, mint and cornflower ...
Then my eye adjusts; I start to see variety. Next thing, imagination has answered the appearance of a chastened landscape with the gift of its generative powers: so, for example, now here I am, at that same window, looking over, say, an eighteenth-entury English parkland. For that scattering of Highland birch trees down there on the flat could be, easily, in this particular light, on this day, a planting by Capability Brown of mighty oaks. Or, in the same way, I can see up there on the hill a set of classical ruins, the remains of a marble temple though made of a chunk of Sutherland rock… This is the sort of thing that goes on. The focus keeps re-aligning, the mind giving fresh readings of a cluster of wild flowers so that, on a long and lonely walk, these seem as intricate and brightly put together as a bouquet of raspberry, mint and cornflower ...
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