His novels document rural customs of great antiquity even as they represent a world standing on the brink of modernity. (Location 105)
Note: we always stand on the brink of modernity.
For Philip Larkin in the 1970s, rural England was vanishing under concrete and tyres. But if Leavis and Thompson were right about the ‘organic community’ having disappeared by the 1930s, one would have thought that by the 1970s the meadows and lanes would have been not ‘Going, Going’ but long Gone. And wasn’t Hardy gauging the same loss of the old ways in The Woodlanders in the 1880s? What about Cobbett in the time of Jane Austen, fulminating about the rise of the new rentier class with their exploitative relationship to the environment? But then Oliver Goldsmith in his Deserted Village of 1770 was blaming modern consumerism for the desolation of the land. Raymond Williams reflects on exactly this problem of historical perspective in his book The Country and the City: the better life is always just behind us, ‘over the last hill’. We imagine that there was an ‘organic community’ in the time of our parents (perhaps) or our grandparents (for sure), but they in turn look back to the ‘good old ways’ and sun-drenched idylls of their own childhood. Williams portrays rural nostalgia as an escalator reaching further and further back into the past. ‘Where indeed shall we go, before the escalator stops?’ he asks. To which ‘One answer, of course, is Eden’. (Location 484)
Note: See Rackham’s History of the Countryside - the answer, if there is an answer, is after the second world war, where the land has changed more than at any time in the previous thousand years.
Myths are necessary imaginings, exemplary stories which help our species to make sense of its place in the world. Myths endure so long as they perform helpful work. (Location 497)
Note: really?
‘The story of the mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western Man’. (Location 525)
Note: Romantic attitude
The image of the earth as a violated woman may strike a chord with the feminist critics who – their eyes riveted to the corpse of Sylvia Plath – have made so much of the aggression and masculinity of Hughes’s poetry, but here the modern translation is only being true to the original. Language which identifies all-conquering humankind as male and the ravaged earth as female is as old as Hesiod. (Location 549)
Note: female earth and landscape
like. In his preface, Rousseau hedges his bets as to whether the ‘state of nature’ is a heuristic model or a real lost condition: (Location 585)
The second discourse is a thought experiment, a piece of hypothetical reasoning which asks us to imagine a state of nature as a way of critiquing the state of society. In this sense, it is in the tradition of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, with the difference that instead of an imaginary better place it envisions an imaginary better time. (Location 587)
Note: oh wait is this like uchronia?
What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out. When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place … Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. Why, even [William] Morris’s poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature can. (Location 2102)
