![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.john-howe.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/05\/SermentsDeuils-port.jpg\" "\\"Serments&Deuils-port\\"")
<\/a><\/center><\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\nWhich is indeed quite similar to this:<\/p>\n
Why do we so love landscapes?
\n(Ruling out those who prefer skyscrapers to skies, highway interchanges to changing tides and chainsaws to cedars\u2026)
\nWhy is it that we are so touched by places that benefit primarily from our absence?
\nThose places that owe their survival mainly to our inability or lack of need to compromise and destroy them.
\nWell that\u2019s it, of course isn\u2019t it.
\nWhat connects us to the land is what makes us human beings.
\nOtherwise our minds are made of concrete and steel.<\/p>\n
As we\u2019re treading carefully and with respect, why not add to the landscape the only thing we can add without punching a road through it, without draining, clear-cutting or putting a shopping center on it. The only touch we can bring to it without corrupting and destroying it – the touch of memory and the caress of dream: the landscapes of the mind.<\/p>\n
Photoshop should have a program like that. Superimpose layer. Layer properties: history, myth, legend, complexity.<\/p>\n
To us city dwellers, who shroud ourselves in a utilitarian geometry of concrete and glass, complexity is the highest quality landscapes can offer. At some point we must have confused rectitude and rectilineal, I think. We have made a religion of, or at very least erected a myriad of altars, to shapes designed principally to facilitate mass production, which is handy when you need a cheap set of bookshelves from Ikea, but not necessarily what you want to see after three days hiking from the road\u2019s end.
\nThat must be why real travel writing is so rewarding to read; becoming a vicarious vagabond for the price of a paperback. The stories added to the landscapes that make then all the more sublime. The BEST books of this kind have to be Patrick Leigh Fermor\u2019s \u201cA Time of Gifts\u201d and \u201cBetween the Woods and the Water\u201d. Alas, I gave them to someone to read, and now must buy new copies (never lend books with titles like that, one will never return, the other one will get lost on a picnic).
\nAnother amazing travel book is \u201cThe Rhine\u201d by none other than Victor Hugo. There is not a vista that doesn\u2019t trigger a flight of the imagination with Hugo, and reading his books is to navigate constantly through time and legend as well as sharing a seat on the carriage. Wonderful. Beats having your luggage lost, at any rate.<\/p>\n
There is a Roman road not far from here (one of many, but this one isn\u2019t blighted by that pathological habit the Swiss have of signposting everything – that is when it can\u2019t be uprooted and transferred to a museum). Every now and then a stroll along it reconciles me with life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
HOBB & HOBB AGAIN<\/p>\n
An illustrator friend sent me a jpeg of a book cover the other day. Goodness, this looks startlingly familiar I thought, where HAVE I seen that before? Well, not exactly, I reacted rather more quickly than that – the smoke from my tires was still hanging in the air when I burst into the local bookshop hollering \u201cNobody move!\u201d. I didn\u2019t buy all four copies – as much as I love Robin\u2019s work, the French editor has an annoying habit of chopping thick American or English paperbacks into several slimmer volumes, which is a clever way of selling 3 or 4 books in lieu of one –\u00a0 but I did purchase this:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.john-howe.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/05\/GoldenFool-cover-port.jpg\" "\\"GoldenFool-cover-port\\"")
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n