Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama
April 5th 2007 07:40
Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory
When I picked up Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory, I knew it was famous but did not know much else. It's supposed to be an environmental history or something like that. I couldn't care less. If you whisper the word the 'environment in my ear', you can put me to sleep. Still, I picked the book to see what it was about and I am glad I did.
Schama's main concern is to point out that men have always been influenced by their environment and it was not left for the enivornmentalism movement to suddenly point out what nobody had noticed before and base their religious utopia/dystopia on it. Every political structure from American democracy to Germany's Nazism was intimately related to the environment on which it was founded. Schama's main task was to flesh out this politcal-environmental commensalism and chart its course through the history and point out how much of our present day mindscape itself is a remnant of this relationship. This, he supposes, will enable him to ward off the environmentalist's claim that a democracy will not be geared towards caring about environment and hence some kind of heavy-handed paternalistic state is required. A person like me would grumble that a democracy like out is geared towards enviroment more than it needs be.
It is a sprawling book which takes us into unknown territories, uncharted narratives and forgotten imaginations and points out the tenuous links between remote cultures( remote to us and to each other) which might seem unrealted on their face.The long narrative is divided into four parts: Wood, Water, Rock and Wood, Water and Rock.
There is a reason to read a book like this. It makes you acquainted with bit players in history and it takes you through a bylanes rather than the highways of history, giving you a different perspective. For example, if you read the official histories of Nazi Germany, you might not pick up on their reverence for Tacitus or the Black Forest, but reading an exhaustive account of it here, gives you a diffferent window into the soul of that monstrous phenonmenon. (I do not say it mitigates Nazism and Schama himself is very scrupulous not to go there.)
It is not necessary or advisable to read it at one sitting. Over many evenings, reading and meditating on the many vistas it opens before us, is the thing.
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