I was watching Cléo de 5 à 7 again the other night, and those gorgeous scenes in Montsouris Park got me thinking about parks in cities versus ‘real’ countryside. Now I love to ride my bicycle through the countryside, that’s a given. But then I thought about that in comparison to those folks who love to go trailing over the moors or adventuring through the wilderness, and I figured that I guess I prefer the idea of cycling on roads for the same reason that I prefer walking in city parks to traipsing around real countryside. And that is, I think, to do with the idea of humans imposing some kind of order on nature.
I guess when I think about it I really do like order, or at the very least designed chaos. It’s like, when I was out riding the other day and I rode over the hills to the reservoirs above the Teign Valley. I love it there. I love those reservoirs. The views are gorgeous, and it’s such a beautiful setting, but the fact is that it is a beauty created by structure. It’s the imposition of engineering that creates the landscape to a great degree. And that’s what makes it beautiful for me. Same with those magnificent pylons that snake through the Culm valley just outside our village, talking the power to/from Exeter. It’s like, ‘blam! We’re putting these things here, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it, Mrs Nature.’ I mean, I know in the huge big picture that Nature Will Win Out. But frankly, sod the big picture. The moment is all that counts.
I was discussing scenic train journeys with someone the other day -actually, I was just showing off about what I've seen- when he said that he hardly ever looks out of train windows, because "he doesn't care about nature." And then I realised that neither do I. I don't like the nature one can see from trains (in Scotland, in Norway, along the Devon coast) per se, but I like how they've built a train line through it.
Posted by: Martijn | August 28, 2007 at 07:47