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Life was not only a process of rediscovering backwards.
—D. H. Lawrence,
Sea and Sardinia (1923)
Did you guess any thing lived only its moment?
—Walt Whitman,
“Song of Prudence” (1881)
If a stone appeals to me and elevates me, tells me how many miles I have come, how many miles remain to travel—and the more the better—reveals the future to me in some measure, it is a matter of private rejoicing. If it did the same service to all, it might well be a matter of public rejoicing.
—Henry David Thoreau,
The Journal (1856)
I found that when the moment was right, by concentrating on some external object, an arrowhead found on Scratch Flat, for example, or the running walls or foundations of the area, I was able to perceive something more than a simple mental picture of what some past event was like. I not only could see the event or the place in my mind’s eye, but would also hear it, smell the woodfires; and sometimes, for just a flash, a microsecond if you care to measure things, I would actually be there, or so it seemed. This is nothing like the experience with the madeleine in Remembrance of Things Past; what I would sense is the reality of an event that I could never have witnessed. Nor is it anything mystical; I don’t claim to have experienced these things in some previous existence. It was simply a heightened awareness or perception of the way things must have been.
I began to talk about our western bias concerning the structure of time. I said that [we] think of time as linear, flowing from past, to present, to future like a river, whereas the [Pawtucket-Micmac Indian] Nompenekit thinks of it as a lake or pool in which all events are contained.
—John Hanson Mitchell,
Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand
Years on One Square Mile (1984)
Human beings inherit little History but many histories. The past bequeaths a small nest egg of stable, undisputed facts and a thick portfolio of speculative issues—divergent, ever changing interpretations—because presents and futures alter pasts. . . . No one can predict the future of the past.
—“Notes and Comment,”
The New Yorker (1989)
We are inclined in America to think that the value of monuments is simply to remind us of origins. They are much more valuable as reminders of long-range, collective purpose, of goals and objectives and principles. As such even the least sightly of monuments gives a landscape beauty and dignity and keeps the collective memory alive.
—J. B. Jackson,
“Concluding with Landscapes” (1984)
[Landmarks] stand for continuity, community, identity, for links with the past and the future. In the contemporary American community these roles are what counteract our mobility and fragmentation and forgetfulness of history.
Stone was a way of establishing the passage of time in terms comprehensible to rational men.
—J. B. Jackson,
“Stone and Its Substitutes” (1984)
—Horace Greeley,
An Overland Journey (1859)
The true-born rockman (for they are born, not made) has always been one of the finest characters in England, with a farmer’s patience, a woodman’s imagination, and the constructive vision and balanced mind of a mathematician. Of old, without infringing the boundaries of his legitimate craft and often unable to read or write, the rockman could do wonderful things. Even today they do not easily put pen to paper, and probably there are few people more inarticulate, few people whose mental processes are less formulated. They have always used an instinct as completely unconscious as that of an Eskimo at a seal hole. Looking at rock and its position, they will arrive at an equation demanding mathematical formulae far beyond their conscious calculation. They will say, putting a finger on the spot, “The shot will shift it here,” but remain quite incapable of telling you how they arrive at that perfectly accurate judgment.
—Dorothy Hartley,
Made in England (1939)
A landscape is where we speed up or retard or divert the cosmic program and impose our own.
It is here in the United States that we see the largest and most impressive example of neo-classic spatial organization Our national grid system, devised by the Founding Fathers, represents the last attempt to produce a Classical political landscape, one based on the notion that certain spaces—notably the square and the rectangle—were inherently beautiful and therefore suited to the creation of a just society.
Instead of being a blueprint for the ideal Classical democratic social order, the grid system became simply an easy and effective way of dividing up the land.
—J. B. Jackson,
“Concluding with Landscapes” (1984)
Perhaps only the stone wall of New England equalled the hedge of the Middle Western prairie as an essential man-made part of a distinctive historical regional landscape. The Kansas part of that landscape rivaled that of New England in durability [until] make-work activity in the 1930s stript the area of most of its hedges.
“Early Fencing on the Western Margin
of the Prairie” (1981)
The Indians give an extravigant account of the exquisite odour of this fruit [of the Osage orange] when it has obtained maturity, which takes place the latter end of summer, or the beginning of Autumn. They state, that at this season they can always tell by the scent of the fruit when they arrive in the neighbourhood of the tree, and usually take advantage of this season to obtain the wood; as it appears not [to] be a very abundant growth, even in the country where it is to be found. An opinion prevails among the Osages, that the fruit is poisonous, tho’ they acknowledge that they have never tasted it.
—Meriwether Lewis,
Letter to Thomas Jefferson (1804)
Much had been expected [by Lewis and Clark] of the Osage orange, called by them the Osage apple, for fabulous tales had been spread about it in the East. After they saw it, however, the explorers lost all interest in it; it did not in any way fulfill their expectations, being useless for timber and producing no valuable fruit.
—E. J. Criswell,
Lewis and Clark: Linguistic Pioneers (1940)
You cannot civilize men if they have an indefinite extent of territory over which to spread. . . . Civilization can best be effected when the country is hedged in by narrow boundaries.
—George McDuffie,
Speech before the U.S. Senate (1843)
I was led to see the utter impossibility of a proper social organization of society, so long as the want of fencing material compelled the people to form broken and scattered settlements on the margins of groves and streams, while all within was left a solitary waste. . . . I then thought that the greatest moral, intellectual, social, and pecuniary benefactor would be the man who should first devise some feasible mode of fencing. Accordingly . . . I commenced a series of experiments with hedge plants.
The Prairie Farmer (1847)
There is a curious logical connection between civilization and rain. All along the frontier, Indians declare that the white man brings rain with him. Thirty years ago, Missourians living on the opposite bank of the river thought the soil of Kansas good for nothing on account of its rainless climate. Since the young state was settled, it has suffered only twice from dry seasons, and of late good crops and increasing rains have dispelled all apprehensions.
—Albert D. Richardson,
Beyond the Mississippi (1867)
Kansas is the only state I have encountered that has made a census—even an estimated census—of the number of its tree inhabitants. For its 86,276 square miles, the population of trees has been set down as about 225,000,000. . . . How many are Osage orange trees nobody knows. But the number must be high.
—Edwin Way Teale,
Journey into Summer (1960)
There is something primitive about the name “barbed wire”—something suggestive of savagery and lack of refinement, something harmonious with the relentless hardness of the Plains.
—Walter Prescott Webb,
The Great Plains (1931)
Prairie and sea plant no other hedgerows than the sky.
—William A. Quayle,
The Prairie and the Sea (1905)
The true character of the spirit of an age is better revealed in its mode of regarding and expressing trivial and commonplace things than in the high manifestations of philosophy and science.
—J. Huizinga,
The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924)
You must never undertake the search for time lost in the spirit of nostalgic tourism.
—Gregor von Rezzori,
The Snows of Yesteryear (1989)
[Captain Henry Brandley] was charitable, kindly, a big man in every respect, and left an honored name in his part of Kansas.
—William Connelley,
Standard History of Kansas and Kansans (1918)