Owning the Landscape

As I read this week’s reading and went for my walk, I thought about the first time I ever read Emerson’s Nature. My seventh grade teacher, Mr. Feenan, handed us a copied version of this text and marched us down to the soccer field to read it. We could sit as close to the woods as we wanted, we just couldn’t be within arm’s reach of another student. That was the easiest part. Next, we had to actually read the essay. Today, I am proud to say that I had an easier go of the reading. Perhaps that comes from Nature being required reading in many courses since then. Maybe it’s because I’m older and wiser. Maybe it is because it now pertains to my life in an “I need to graduate” sense. Whatever the case, it went better this time. Throughout this reading, I had so many different thoughts. Many of them pertained to things I liked about what Emerson wrote.

One passage that made me think a lot about what I see on a daily basis begins, “The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape” (5). To me this is so true. According to the law, those that have paid for a parcel of property own it. They belong to each other; one in the same. It is when we step back and look at the scene before us, that it is indistinct as to who owns what. We see a grander picture, and not a puzzle of lands pieced together by deeds and taxes. Emerson continues, “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title” (5). I think that this is an interesting statement. When we are on a piece on land we can associate a name to that land, but when we view the same land from a distance, it becomes a part of something entirely unique. This is a fact that has always baffled me. When I am standing in the middle of the corn on my family’s farm, it is mine. It is beneath my feet and is tangible. But that piece of land over there, that is not ours. I have no claim to it. But, when I climb Mount Mansfield, I can see where those patches of land meet and become one with a greater whole. I know that not all of it belongs to me, but this picture is one that only I can appreciate and keep as my own. Even though the next person to climb up this mountain may stand in this exact spot, they will see it differently. They might gaze across the land on an overcast day. They might enjoy the winding Winooski River more than the different patches of green. The next person might look to New York and completely gloss over the farms, rivers, and roads that sprawl like veins beneath the shadow of the mountain. In each of these new views, a new piece of land is created and given a new owner.