Jackson, John Brinckerhoff.  The Necessity for Ruins. U of Massachusetts Press, Amherst.  1980. Chapter: "Learning about Landscapes," 1-18.  Much of this stuff seems to have been previous published in Landscape magazine.  Key words are in bold.

I kept avoiding this book because it seemed dry and sort of unappealing.  I read a chapter or two earlier and didn't know what to do with it.  Today, caught in the vet's office with the coughing dog mystery, I had time to dip into the introduction and was really excited by what I found.  The use here is mostly in terms of his prose style, his ability to see two sides to things (such as advocating and regretting the excesses of a tourists approach to landscape) and his insights, which I hope to grab as quotes.  He can help me in the introduction, or at least in the Commonplace section I intend to create at the beginning of each chapter.  This is my first full read through with the dog asleep in my office and both window fans going full blast. Hot!

1) "I touched on roads and field, on town and village layouts, on farms and factories and even places where games were played, I found myself increasingly interested in the history of those things and how they helped in the formation of communities."

2) "My topic was named 'The History of the American Cultural Landscape" -- by which was meant the natural environment as modified by man."

[Talks about the development of an academic discipline in Landscape Studies, though he doesn't call it that.]

3)..."a good teacher, I supposed, is one who designed his or her course so that it prepares the students for a rewarding life."  But the more he thought about this, "the more I was convinced my course had little practical or scholarly value.  So my contribution to the education of my students was simply this: I taught them how to be alert and enthusiastic tourists."

3) "I feel a bond with every tourist I se reading the pages of fine print and condensed prose in an effort to interpret the surrounding world."

3) Yet we are all of us strangers, tourists, at one time or another, and from our own experience we should recognize the individual impulse for self-improvement that is back of so much tourist travel."

3) ...the inspiration of tourism is a desire to know more about the world in order to know more about ourselves.

4) "What seems to overlooked is...the contribution tourism has made not only to the discovery of the word but to our way of interpreting it."

4) "The rise of tourism some four centuries ago marked the beginning of a new and much closer relationship between people and the landscape they lived in, and it was not the philosopher or the scientist who did the pioneering but the solitary, uninformed traveler, setting out, hardly knowing why, in search of a new kind of pleasure and new kind of knowledge.

4) Montaigne as the father of tourism.  The purpose for tourism had changed from a religious pilgrimage or the search for new markets to the desire to, as he put it, "'report on the temperament of nations and their geographical motive,' -- a geographical motive."

4) "But [Montaigne] also mentioned a motive not hitherto identified with travel -- greater self awareness; the opportunity, Montaigne explained, 'to rub our minds and polish them by contact with others'."

5) To Montaigne and his generation, knowing the world had a richer and more specific meaning: it meant participation in the everyday world of living and working and celebrating.  It meant knowing the creations of man, his institutions and art and architecture, and something about the past.

5)  [Note here that Jackson's inspiration in Montaigne is not a snooty tourism, but one where the traveler, the "stranger" is involved in the life of others.]

5) Whenever I have read one of their accounts [of travel] I have been struck by the sharpness of their sensory response: they describe and comment on the food and wine served at than inn, on the variety of accents, on the instruments played by street musicians, the color and texture of clothes, the smell of crowded rooms, the refreshing sound of fountains, the brilliance of light at a ceremony, the lonely dark of the forest.

6) Foucault's The Order of Things is mentioned, the trope of the world as a mirror of the man.

6) Jackson imagines a tourist of old looking at the landscape and seeing written in it a coherent account "consistent with the Classical tradition, and endorsed by the church; a trustworthy guide to understanding and accepting human ways."  Landscape as revealing men living a God-directed life.  Something deeply confirming and affirming about the landscape, then.  He envies that perspective, when "men and women derived something more substantial than esthetic pleasure form the view of a beautiful and prosperous landscape, when instead of a simple view, they saw the expression of what seemed an admirable social order, and they gathered evidence that man was still carrying out the divine mandate to bring nature of perfection." NICE.  BUT I DO NOT FEEL THIS.  I FEEL SOME DISMAY.

6/7:....four hundred years ago the tourist experience was new and revolutionary; it has only just emerged from an attitude of distrust of the visible world, or at best, indifference to it.  However limited their sympathies may have been, the first tourists set out to do what few had ever done before: learn about the world as a means of learning about themselves...."

The Renaissance world (for 400 year ago) has long since ceased to be a mirror to modern man: when he looks into it he no longer sees his own image, merely the image of a vanished culture" [and this is what I see, this is the dismay; furthermore, I see the end of any future culture, culture eating itself].

8) Sehenswürdigkeiten:  objects deserving to be seen.  That's the old-style tourism, he says.  But he defends it.  9) "But as I look back on many summers of such European travel I wonder if they were not in fact and excellent introduction to the different phase of tourism that I have learned to call landscape studies."

10) "I found the romanticizing of the traditional landscape sympathetic to my way of seeing the world."  [I too believe it these ruins are beautiful, for they seem to indicate a culture of greater individual restraint (see Matthew Crawford) and also a community of greater interconnection and greater balance, with the family at the center.]

10/11) I found the romanticizing of the traditional landscape sympathetic to my way f seeing the world.  How could it have been otherwise?  It was precisely that aspect of the landscape I had been taught to admire that was being threatened: the vestiges of an old-pre-industrial, pre-democratic order, the fragments of a way of life that had been described and praises by great names of literature and art for more than four centuries.  There could be no other civilization than this.

11) He found that he tended to view landscapes not as the "haphazard products of economic or environmental forces but as profound expressions of ethnic or racial traits.  The ancestral landscape created a special breed of men and women with common psychological and physical characteristics, and this came about through centuries-old attachment to the land; it was only by being rooted in the land, by having a peasant or land-holding background, by having undergone the ineffable influences of a certain climate a certain topography, that a true German or Englishman or Frenchman came into being.  It followed that landscape was a cultural heritage that must at all costs be preserved intact."  HEIDEGGER, RIGHT?  BUT THIS URGE TO PRESERVE LANDSCAPE -- DOES THAT REQUIRE THIS ROMANTIC VIEW OF HOW LANDSCAPE PRODUCES A KIND OF AUTHENTIC ("true") PERSON?

Really interesting how he sees a military takeover of the countryside as a new form of social order. "Everywhere there were craters full of black water that trembled after an explosion."  and "Armies do more than destroy, they create an order of their own." and 

(15) "What really distinguished these [fighting] men from their colleagues at headquarters was their greater awareness of the environment.

16: "In itself there was nothing unusual about this environmental awareness.  Experience promptly showed how essential it was, and every man took pains to cultivate it.  What made it immensely valuable was that it was a shared experience, talked about, passes on to newcomers, and accepted by all as part of their combat existence.  It had little in common with a feeling for nature, and indeed it derived more from urban than from country hazards.  These sensory responses were rarely of an exalted kind: loathing of the taste of C rations, the luxurious feel of clean clothes, the warmth and light o f a roadside fire -- all those hands stretching out of the darkens toward the flames! -- their joy at the coming of sunny days in the spring; these were simply commonplace ways of participating in the world through the sense, but sharing them, recognizing them in others, made men remember their humanity.  This is how we should think about landscapes- not merely how they look, how they conform to an esthetic ideal, but how they satisfy elementary needs- the need for sharing some of those sensory experiences in a familiar place: popular songs, popular dishes, a special kind of weather supposedly found nowhere else, a special kind of sport or game, played only here in this spot.  These things remind us that we belong--or used to belong--to a specific place:  ac country, a town, a neighborhood.  A landscape should establish bonds between people, the bond of language, of manners, of the same kind of work and leisure, and above all a landscape should contain the kind of spatial organization which fosters such experiences and relationships; spaces for coming together, to celebrate, spaces for solitude, spaces that never change and are always as memory depicted them.

17: ...I think the day is past when harmony, adjustments, can be our landscape criterion; what we contemporary men and women are, and what we are becoming is something which can no longer be faithfully reflected in the visible landscape.  For the military landscape revealed two aspects of humanity: it was not only a throwback to the brutality and primitiveness of the Dark Ages, it was also a glimpse of the future.  Those urgent, unremitting efforts to establish communications, the trailing wires and signs and symbols and colored lights, foreshadowed our present groping for new kinds of community.  that overreaching lust for power and mobility and final solutions is still transforming and mutilating the environment.  The search for sensory experiences of the world as the most reliable source of self-knowledge is more insistent than ever.

18: It is only when we begin to participate emotionally in a landscape that its uniqueness and beauty are revealed to us.

 NOTES:

So what Jackson is suggesting that we can treat landscape as text and ask questions about how we can and should interpret it.  He brings in two important ways of thinking about landscape, both of which we all probably rely on without thinking about it.  The first is personal experience.  He goes to great lengths to talk about his own encounters as a tourist and soldier, and in the latter points out that we have to understand landscape as a community event that is experienced personally.  We have to think of it in terms of how it contributes to our sense, society and memory: "sensory experiences in a familiar place: popular songs, popular dishes, a special kind of weather supposedly found nowhere else, a special kind of sport or game, played only here in this spot.  These things remind us that we belong--or used to belong--to a specific place:  ac country, a town, a neighborhood.  A landscape should establish bonds between people, the bond of language, of manners, of the same kind of work and leisure, and above all a landscape should contain the kind of spatial organization which fosters such experiences and relationships; spaces for coming together, to celebrate, spaces for solitude, spaces that never change and are always as memory depicted them."  Landscape is sort of a storyline, a common prompt, the refrain that neighbors share, a common discouse.  We can talk with others, I think he's implying, about the weather, the soil, and about our memories of times past ("spaces that never change and are always as memory depicted them").  It is a storybook.

But he is also suggesting that we remember how our speculations are shaped or guided by certain habits of looking.  The Renaissance seems to have provided a way of valuing and viewing agrarian landscapes as a kind of affirmation (when it was orderly and fine), a sign of God's will working on earth in well-directed people.  That's pretty wonderful to imagine.  He quotes Foucault's idea of the "mirror," where a culture find human attributes in everything profound (the world is a body like our body, etc).  Jackson says, though, that we have to hesitate in seeing landscape as ""haphazard products of economic or environmental forces but as profound expressions of ethnic or racial traits."  This theory that the landscape shows our quiet identity is one he mostly rejects.  He says the old school position was that "The ancestral landscape created a special breed of men and women with common psychological and physical characteristics, and this came about through centuries-old attachment to the land; it was only by being rooted in the land, by having a peasant or land-holding background, by having undergone the ineffable influences of a certain climate a certain topography, that a true German or Englishman or Frenchman came into being.  It followed that landscape was a cultural heritage that must at all costs be preserved intact." I hear Heidegger in this, and he mentions somewhere the "final solution" idea.  Landscape as identity, divine sanction, and the call to order and defense, all in one.  

Maybe it is?