Wherever I find myself, I like to figure out where I am, in the sense of the four points of the compass, in the sense of a spot on the map, but Towson was conducive to a subjective state in which orientation didn’t matter. In my early years at the Sheraton, a whiff of location came through in the distinctive Baltimorean accent of the African American housekeeping staff, a sweetness conveying the funny, sorry loveliness of the human pickle and our connection to one another in it. All that in a simple “Good morning.” The sight of the sun setting over the mall roof one evening told me I was looking west, which took me mentally to D.C., prompting the realization that I was in my old Balt–Wash schoolroom, of which Towson was a floating piece. More natural was to sink back into the dreamlike state of personal routes.
A dejected supermarket across an eight-lane intersection from the Sheraton offered basic supplies. One day I spotted some crab cakes in a deli there. They looked good, though the careless surroundings made me doubtful. The boy behind the counter told me that they were made on-site. He spoke about them with a solemnity that reminded me of watermen on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake. I asked the boy to heat two crab cakes. He was a little confused—the request wasn’t usual. I am staying at the Sheraton, I explained. He saw my predicament. Pointing to a venerable, large, odd-looking steam device behind him, he said he couldn’t guarantee that my crab cakes wouldn’t explode if he put them in there. I said go ahead. It turned out all right. I took my crab cakes back across the intersection, all the way to my room, where I ate them in a thronelike office chair at my blond desk: simple and delicious—I was in the Chesapeake Bay region.
Once I realized I was close to the Eastern Shore, I got into the habit of visiting a friend out there in the middle of my Towson sojourns. There was, in the voyage, a sense of hurling myself across an abyss in a capsule. The capsule was a flimsy rental car. The abyss was a brutal bit of beltway. I’m a good driver, but on this trip I’d feel nervous. Probably this was just the dependency one develops living in a hotel for days on end: you don’t do for yourself in a normal sense, and that engenders a feeling that you can’t.
But then I would be across the Chesapeake and on back roads through fields in their August fullness, and I would lower the window and feel the good air on my face and see its easy movement through the full-grown corn and the soybeans, barns settled knowingly in the swales, silos gone hatless, sprouting out the top, others confabulated with mechanistic extensions: all an inland scene, sweet smelling, and then a flash of blue, and this always made me sit up in my little car. The blue would be a pond. From the pond would issue a stream. The stream would eventually widen into a tidal creek that would find its way to a small tidal river that would itself widen and then empty into a larger estuarial river that in its own turn would widen and flow into the bay. The bay itself was estuarial, fed by the Susquehanna River, its principal freshwater source with headwaters in Ostego Lake in upstate New York. As it approached the Bay, the Susquehanna widened dramatically, becoming estuarial, that is to say tidal, near Baltimore, where it flowed into the bay, a form taken by all the lesser rivers and even smaller creeks flowing into the bay, all the way down to Hampton Roads, the sea passage between the bottom of the Chesapeake peninsula and the mainland, where the bay meets the ocean.
My friend’s house was on the Corsica, a middle-sized river. On arriving I would greet him, and we would chat. But as soon as politeness permitted I would put a kayak into the Corsica and head off downstream—not because I didn’t want to see my host but because after a week in the Sheraton I felt subhuman and had to recover myself before I could really be present to his company. The Corsica there is in the dramatically widening stage. The headlands in the distance downstream on a sunny day are bright and inviting. Nevertheless, I would soon turn into the mouth of a smaller creek. The journey upstream would be the story in reverse, the serial narrowing of the Chesapeake formation. The allure is the source, the innermost place to which one is drawn as to a place of perfect peace and still awareness.
A long, narrow dock that had been picked up by a storm, twisted like a ribbon, and then set down again stretched nearly to the middle of the mouth of the creek in those years. At the outer end, ospreys had built a big, crazy-twigged nest. When there were chicks in the nest, the parents would frantically dive at a person passing nearby in a boat. Even when the nest was empty, I’d give the nest a wide berth, going for the far shore. All Chesapeake waters have been brown since plows were put to land, though the water near the far shore would look black, as in a woodland pond.
The shore itself was lakelike—grasses and wild irises, bees and butterflies. But the tides made their way in, secretly undermining trees until they fell over into the water, then lived on providing leafy bowers to passersby. Eventually dying, the trees then were stripped by the weather until they became silvery and essential, pointing outward over the creek with long-tapering fingers with which they made exquisitely precise points. Herons, extended through long necks to similarly didactic beaks, favored these preaching trees as perches and, being also gray, were so like the trees I didn’t always see them until they rose creakily, with prehistoric croaks, and glided up the creek sublimely.
One Towson sojourn, I spotted a handwritten notice on an index card posted in a Starbucks about a lecture nearby, sponsored by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF). The notice was old, the lecture long given. But it recalled to me the recent history of the bay. The foundation was formed, in 1967, as a private effort to reverse the bay’s advancing deterioration. The goal at the time was to restore the bay to a pristine wilderness state, with clear waters as found by European settlers. In the mid-1970s, the new, moon-shot-inspired Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) using the data gathered by the foundation began compiling an extensive report on the bay, consisting of five parts that were made public in the early ’80s. The report made clear that to reverse the deterioration of the bay, the entire watershed would have to be regulated. This would mean convincing at least the four principal watershed states—Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York—as well as the District of Columbia to enact laws governing what went into the tiniest stream. State cultures with regard to land-use regulation varied wildly. Maryland was progressive. In Virginia, property rights trumped. The headwaters of the Susquehanna, in Otsego Lake in western New York, were so far from the bay that a felt sense of the Chesapeake was close to nonexistent.
All the states, and D.C. eventually, fell in line, passing pollution-control legislation, though of varying stringency, with New York coming in last, signing on fully to the Chesapeake Bay Agreement only in 2014. By that time the goal of perfectly restoring the bay was rolled back to one of arresting deterioration and attaining an ecological balance between the needs of man and of marine life. Even that has had its disappointments and scandals. Virginia, predictably, had been more loathe than other states to restrict developers. But I have sat in hearings in atopian Fairfax at which a big-time builder of a new batch of condominiums was held to account for how construction would affect a small underground stream. Perhaps not all hearings are as fastidious as the ones I attended. But there can be no question that the Chesapeake Bay initiative made the watershed not only a topographical entity in the public imagination but into a felt political jurisdiction that cut across deep-set traditional boundaries. It had done this much more successfully than a lot of metropolitan councils and boards focused on fostering economic prosperity across fixed jurisdictions.
The Chesapeake Bay initiative was an environmental one, which saw itself in terms of restraining economic ventures in order to protect what had been given to us by nature. The fundamental assumption, in other words, was that human prosperity and the integrity of nature operated in different spheres which belonged on different planes and were in many ways opposed. The idea of the watershed, for example, had long been an esoteric unit belonging to ecological science, having little to do with economic development, which was governed by states with their different land-use laws and political cultures. However, in the meantime, the movement out of the industrial age and into our present one was redefining the relationship between terrain and work. Already in the 1990s, but ever more so through the ’00s, a connection was emerging between large watersheds and the more diffuse settlement pattern of our digital global age, which had different spatial needs. For, ethereal as the work of the digital age is, as irrelevant as distance has become in so many ways, physical proximity still has a role, especially at the top levels. We have seen it in the gentrification of New York, the most centralized major city on earth, we have seen it in the high price of real estate in Silicon Valley, and we have seen it in the fact that edge cities do not in fact pop up in the corn fields of Kansas but, more or less, near other edge cities, even if the central city close by has become a hollowed core.
But the proximity requirements in a global, electronically facilitated economy are larger-scaled than those required by traditional industrial work. To the extent that central cities still act as centers to which large enterprises, however loosely, hove, the resources of two or three cities are now required to create the productive synergy of success in our time. For example, the global enterprise of today often requires several research universities near its headquarters, or even its significant outposts, to supply both innovation and the quantity of highly educated employees that are the backbone of today’s top tier of work. In other words, the spatial unit of work has become more regional than defined by a single big city, as we have seen in the ambi- and trivalent place names that have become common. The form of our times is regional, rather than city-centered. The landscape pattern created by work in our time is, interestingly, more like the old agrarian one: it has many centers like a painting by Kandinsky. “Region” is indeed an old word, going back to “kingdom,” a time when boundaries were a bit vague, as defined by culture more than law, and, in many cases, topography, especially mountains. Regions are still recognized today as cultural units. But though there is no exact, political definition of region, there is, in many cases, a topographical one, and that is the large watershed, very precisely delineated today through scientific surveying methods. Especially where there are mountains, big watersheds often define the regions within which the engines of the far-flung global economy work in concert. So, as it turns out, the large watershed, the natural unit of ecological health, is also sometimes the spatial unit of economic prosperity in the present era.
What is most interesting about this to me is the way in which the seeming opposition between economic prosperity and ecological health begins to dissolve. This has everything to do with the nature of work in our new age. The overlap between large watersheds and the clusters of resources needed to participate successfully in the worldwide economy includes, perhaps above all, the need for highly educated, talented employees. This is where environmental and economic health converge. For such people are choosy about where they live. To draw them, companies must be located near vibrant cities—this is where the recovery of old cities really matters—but also in places that, in the wider sense, are attractive. And that means ecologically healthy. This is why the rust belt staggers in its recovery: the industrial heyday left a degraded environment behind. The right wing still opposes environmental regulation on the grounds that it suppresses growth. Putting aside, for the moment, the ultimate issue of how climate change threatens prosperity at its root, looking only at the requirements for short-term success at the regional level, the fact is that, with the rise of mind-work, it has come to pass that a clean environment fosters rather than represses economic growth. This happy calculus, which somehow has not yet infiltrated political culture, has, however, an infernal underside: the healthier the ecology of a region, the more people and businesses it attracts. This, in turn, puts ever more pressure on the environment, escalating the challenge of protecting it. In my Georgetown years I followed a study, the Loudoun County Environmental Indicators Project, a five-year program conducted at George Washington University that was tracking change down in the grass roots—the actual grass roots, in part—as the county developed, especially in Eastern Loudoun, focusing on pollution from residential sources such as road runoff and lawn fertilizers, ever increasing, and impacting the natural environment in stealthy but cumulatively destructive ways.
When, just after moving to D.C., I was assimilating regional points of reference for my own sense of orientation, side trips would help me expand and then consolidate what seemed like a physical relationship with the landscape. I remember in particular the experience of Harpers Ferry, where the Shenandoah dramatically joins the Potomac River: this became a reference point to the west. Visiting a friend on the Rappahannock near Fredericksburg became a reference to the south. In my basement study in Georgetown I sometimes activated this slow-forming internal map by thinking outward with my body—toward Harpers Ferry, toward Fredericksburg—to see how far it sensed itself in place: a kind of somatic mapping. It seemed to me that somatic distance was perhaps marked by how far the body could imagine walking while retaining a sense of being in range of home, though that would be a rather fictional body, since an actual walk from Georgetown to Fredericksburg was not likely. Utterly unreliable as all this was, it seemed to engage a faculty of some kind. I valued the balance these intimations provided to more abstract research. In my study there was a low window that looked out on the back garden but was crowded by leaves. One day rain spattered on the leaves and the glass causing me to look up from my work, and my awareness automatically leapt to a forest place high in the Alleghenies, where rain was also falling.
The Chesapeake Bay itself quickly became such a felt reference. But when I became aware of the watershed—through learning the history of the foundation rather than going places—the somatic map seemed to coincide with the watershed boundaries. If I thought I was tapping into some ancient instinct this was purely fanciful, since, old as watersheds are, people didn’t really think in terms of them commonly until recent ecological awareness. The watershed is more of a scientific concept than a lived one. But when the Chesapeake watershed became a subject of study for me, as a container of the atopian landscape of Balt–Wash, my informal somatic-mapping experiments came along. It kept me from getting too abstract. It kept me with at least one foot in the simple fact of our whereabouts—in bodies on the ground.
Along the way I acquired a poster-sized Landsat image of the watershed. There was no writing on it. As for boundaries, only state lines were represented and those so faintly they could hardly be seen. Baltimore and Washington, D.C., were just gray smudges, easy to miss. But the jiggly edge of the watershed was prominently marked with a white line, which stood out in high contrast to the dark greens, dull reds, and browns of the land. You could see from the intricate irregularity of the line that very sophisticated surveying equipment, or perhaps computerized satellite information, had been used for the detailed denotation of the watershed boundary on irregular land. The outline of the watershed came together as a centaurish dancing giant, his scraggy head thrown back ecstatically in western New York, his hands clasped on his chest in prayer, bestial thighs through the mid-Atlantic states, his right hoof—the tip of the Chesapeake Peninsula—en pointe like a ballerina as the slopes of the Alleghenies flew out behind him like tattered skirts: a figment of our unblinking collective, informational eye, on the outermost edge of our man-made enclosure of ourselves.
When, on the creek off the Corsica river, I disturbed the herons on their perches, they glided upstream to a place where the wooded shore stretched straight across, as if the creek ended there. But the herons would take a sharp right, as I would, too, in turn, following them into a suddenly narrowed waterway, secretively winding between tall reeds. Next came a moderate opening, where a grass-covered earthen dam extended from one shore toward, but not quite meeting, the other, connected to it by a dilapidated wooden structure with a once movable panel in it. This apparatus, I speculated, was for purposes of controlling the mixing of saltwater from the sea and freshwater from the upper reaches of the stream, for purposes of cultivation. The panel had long ago been left in a half-open position, leaving a space just big enough to get through in a kayak if you crouched.
Then I’d find myself in a wide labyrinth of cressy islands with a periphery of mature woodland. The herons, disturbed again, this time from live trees just the other side of the dam, would head for a particularly tall copse on the far side, the likely fall line of the freshwater stream that they would follow, fishing, right on up to the headwater pond, somewhere in the interior. I knew from experience that even at high tide I could not follow. The idea of the innermost recess, the still place at the source, had strong allure, but never had I succeeded in finding my way to a source-pond by following an Eastern Shore creek. I did once find the source of a creek but that was by car: it turned out to be a pond enclosed in chain link with a vent protruding from the middle. In the cressy place, as was my custom, I made no attempt to reach the stream, but instead moved along the shore on my right, where the water was deep, to a commodious bower near a half-overgrown landscape in which a pentimento of past agricultural uses still showed through. The bower would provide still point enough. Ten minutes and I would be restored from the depredations of Towson.
And then it would start: the layers, the contradictions, the imperative of what had become an implacable curiosity about the complex and largely unimagined character of the world as it was becoming, infiltratively atopian, the fiction of escaping Towson notwithstanding. But each year I found myself more at ease with this truth, more fluent in atopian, more accepting. Each year my curiosity about the new world was a little stronger, my old romances a bit less interesting. Each year the shift from restorative escape to explorative probing was easier, more natural, but the actual upshot was not a replacement of one experience by another, not a contest between false and true, but rather a swinging back and forth between perspectives that always seemed to get me closer to reality than when I embraced one or the other alone. All along I had known both were there.
Even as I set out on the Corsica, I knew that if I turned upstream I would immediately see a slew of perfectly schizoid McMansions that looked like images cut out of magazine advertisements and pasted on the air. The glimpse of gorgeous fields down to the shore on my chosen route was inseparable from knowledge that this landscape was an artifact of Maryland land-use policy, their beauty an economic factor in the region that kept real estate values high. If I forgot that the Chesapeake Bay had become a not totally successful artifact of protective law, an unfamiliar algae bloom would remind me.
Who is to say what nature is to us under these conditions? You go out into it and there it is, glorious beyond comprehension, spookily numinous, blowing away the intellectual plane of consciousness, transforming you in an instant as if you had been struck by lightning: that isn’t false. But it’s also true that, whatever this man-made enclosure is from which we can’t escape, nature is in there with us. It’s reduced and contained, as in a terrarium of our own making. But, on the other hand, in its new roguishness it’s more enormous than we have ever known. We thought we had conquered it: now it’s threatening us in a way that requires a resourcefulness we have not yet found in ourselves. It’s the ground beneath us out of which we arose and in which we are still embedded inextricably. And yet it is also our ward. Nature is salving still and yet it has also become inherently alarming: most of all because we know that what is alarming is our own doing. We are entrapped in nature, and also unbearably exposed there: exposed to ourselves. Nature used to be the thing outside society; now it’s inside society. So because we have so far failed as effective stewards, yet are as dependent as ever, nature also represents our ungovernedness: our inability in this very basic matter of self-preservation to take care of ourselves.
Always there is this despair in nature for us now, that we have put ourselves in a position of responsibility with respect to it that was formerly attributed to God, but without acquiring godlike powers. Our old romantic relationship with nature provided a language for our emotions and our ideals: inner storms and tranquillity, freedom, democracy—all metaphor. Now we see our own hand in all nature, together with our human limits, literally, not metaphorically: our hubris, our greed, our helplessness over ourselves, our ingenuity, our imbeddedness. Once we saw nature as flecked with glory: divinity even, to which we responded with an awe and humility that became an inherent part of our humanity. Glory still shines out, but mixed in is the gleam of haywire: laid there by us. Sometimes a natural disaster occurs that is in no way traceable to our own doings. What a relief it is to be frightened—and awed—by the effects of a volcano. Terrible as a major earthquake is, there is simplicity in rushing to the rescue, merely heroic, doing our creaturely best to help one another in the face of what insurers call “an act of God”: an event beyond our control. Now some small earthquakes are said to be caused by fracking. How different the meaning of a natural and fracking-caused earthquake.
Over the years, the housekeeping staff at the Towson Sheraton has changed: it consists now mainly of immigrants from cultures entirely unlike our own. One rarely hears the Baltimorean accent in the hotel anymore. The dreary supermarket has gone, too: one year it was replaced by a construction site, the next by a sophisticated and appealing enterprise, the Fresh Market, with a vast deli but no kid, no strange steam-heating device. Sometimes crab cakes, pretty good. I have not gone to the Eastern Shore for a while because my friend with awful quickness took ill and died, before his time. His ashes were thrown out over the water, and the breeze lifted them and they expanded a little, caught by the sun in a moving shape, before dispersing and falling. Sometimes the improvised ritual exceeds anything tradition can provide. But what I have found in this loss is that my ritual creek passage has become installed in my Sheraton room. Just as Towson was there on the creek, so now the creek has become a part of Towson.
To my mind, the despair that we feel in relation to nature has less to do with our failure to protect nature than with our failure to protect ourselves. The despair is humanistic, not technical: we have not yet figured out how to govern ourselves effectively enough to become good custodians of nature. That is perhaps the darkest feature of this despair, and yet there is also hope in it: the answer lies within ourselves. It’s natural to want to protect ourselves, so it doesn’t seem foolish to hope that we will. But our relationship to nature is not the only instance in which we are unable to respond in a self-protective way to a self-made situation that reflects our brilliance, and even power, but could also doom us, reflecting our helplessness before ourselves in the same fateful way. The coordinates of our nature problem are almost exactly the same as those created by the Cold War, while molecular biology may well present us with a similar paradox of triumphant achievement and boundless disaster in the future. Who among us would be astonished if tomorrow some other unforeseen predicament with the same coordinates appeared?
It might seem to compound despair to point this out. But to my mind the connection between predicaments is positive. It shows us to be on a threshold that, extending across a spectrum of facets of life, may be susceptible to the same political solution. This order of problems seems to require the development of a capacity in ourselves, an interior shift. The outcome would be political, but first a deep reimagining of ourselves and our situation would be necessary, as I have been attempting to do in a small way here. Always behind my readings of landscapes are the questions, Where are we? What is our relationship to one another? and What is our relationship to our surroundings now? Political effectiveness under drastically new circumstances must start with basic questions of this kind. The equivalent might be the imaginative leap that broke past belief in the divine right of kings toward the possibility of shared power. I have sometime thought of our situation in this period as like that of the English just before the Magna Carta was written. But on a visit to the British Museum in the midst of these long studies, I saw, to my amazement, that there were, actually, several Magna Cartas. It wasn’t a simple dawn. It was a messy repetitive struggle, of power but also of imagination, such as we are engaged with in the present period as we fumble our way toward a society reconfigured to our circumstances, our needs.
A common aspect of our multiple contemporary predicaments, again, is that we have acquired godlike responsibilities but without godlike powers. To put it another way, we have to find a human way to develop self-governance in areas that previously did not require it. Meanwhile the idea of a deity who will magically come down and rescue us has become downright dangerous, in that it suggests that we are not, in fact, really responsible for ourselves in these new ways. A dilemma is that each of these predicaments also contains immeasurable stakes: the end of civilization, the upending of the cradle of providence. The stakes transcend all other human concerns. But how does one comprehend stakes beyond measure, how can one even bear to really engage fully with such predicaments without an internal sense of transcendence—something larger than our situation, which is exactly what has been taken away by the predicament itself? Some say all sense of transcendence is childish invention that should be relegated to the ash heap of primitive delusions. But there is a difference between religion as we have known it, which does seem out of joint with our times, and the capacity to conceive of transcendence, out of which religion arose. Surely that capacity is a power, not a weakness. Surely to be without that is no advance.
As we face predicaments that present us with immeasurable stakes, and that require a kind of collective internal change, a stretching and development of our nature rather than our know-how, our ability to conceive of the immeasurable, would surely seem to be a part of the human instrument we should cultivate rather than discard. The problem is similar to that of seeing past the glorious Romantic archetypes of landscape to what landscape is and means today. The question in relation to transcendence is how to cultivate it in response to an entirely new situation, learning from the superb traditions that gave us Chartres and the Blue Mosque, and yet free enough from stupendously well-developed expressions of this capacity to find the infant response that is true to our present situation. Because I think the capacity is a gift essential to our humanity, I am certain that civilizations of the future will find ways to express and develop it. But in the meantime, as we strive to secure that future, our best course might be to cultivate an open faith without doctrine, a faith of no footing, accepting for now just the naked capacity itself as our footing in the midst of uncertainty and contradictions. This wouldn’t be faith in a deity but rather faith in life itself: that we have within us the ability to respond effectively to any situation we ourselves created—to grow into it: not that we will respond successfully, but that we could.
I believe that keeping our sense of transcendence in play is likely to expand our imaginative growth as we grapple with enclosure, rather than diminishing it. But this argument, like the others, is based on the conviction that our ability to conceive of transcendence is a gift and a power rather than a form of whistling in the dark. Let me emphasize again that my focus here is on human capacity and not an idea of a deus ex machina coming down to change the course of human events. To my way of thinking, a faith of no faith is far more useful, and more empowering, and also probably more truthful to our circumstances than either the hubristic belief that we can geo-engineer our way out of problems, or the righteous, all-knowing posture of despair. At the bottom, what I care about most is the imaginative creativity necessary for political reinvention. While we face great dangers, we may find the foundations for a great new civilization in our response to them. It’s this that can fire our ambitions, our hopes. We must relentlessly and realistically appraise our situation but, lest we become paralyzed by fear and despair, we must also think past catastrophe to what a successful engagement with dangers might produce. I think we need our intimations of an unknowable and unmeasurable dimension to existence to get there. Never yet has there been a great civilization that did not cultivate those intimations—because there is no full humanity without them.
Sometimes the spread of the global economy is seen as a kind of Americanization. This is a big exaggeration. But the world is now having an experience similar to one we have lived with for a long time in America: the unrelenting unraveling of tradition and the way that unraveling rips out context, exposing people to the emptiness of life without deep culture. Because of the long American commitment to inclusion, and therefore growth, we are used to that emptiness here. It is our cornerstone of no cornerstone, our culture of no culture. It is, you could say, a kind of faith of no footing. The great paradox of the worldwide enclosure is that, while bringing prosperity to previously poor parts of the world, it also undermines the value of what has been accumulated, stealing cultural inheritance, leaving people bereft of the great webs of connection and collective human depth that cultures provide. I am reluctant to characterize Americans as special in any regard, because that has gotten us into so much trouble. Yet we may have a special role in this unfolding planetary situation, not as a people excepted from the tragic laws of history, as we are wont to believe, but as one long used to cultural loss, to vulnerability, to exposure, to emptiness—to keeping faith in a fragile experiment, rampant evidence of failure notwithstanding. We come to the worldwide enclosure long inured to the emptiness that this new stage of humanity is now imposing on all peoples. So in our familiarity with that, we might be especially able, among peoples, to contribute something about how to live in this new wilderness with its dangers and its possibilities—even maybe how to civilize it—leaving to older cultures the task of how to preserve and carry forward the treasures of the past in a way that is useful in this new world.
Some say that we have reached a dead end of imaginative invention, that no poetic image, no brushstroke is possible that isn’t derivative of something already done. Certainly one effect of the enclosure is a sense of limitations: there is only so much in the garden. But I interpret insistence on this as a sophisticated form of deflection. We may have enclosed ourselves, but this puts us on an interior threshold about which little is stale or familiar. Whether it’s the paradox of being responsible for our own footing, the challenge of imaginatively grasping the effects of enclosure, or the disappearance of landscape itself as we have known it, this is not a dead end. Rather it is a beginning, in which the human imagination is in its early days of finding itself, in which we know little, in which all is to be discovered.