Landscape And Memory

706 Pages·1996·69.61 MB·English

by  Simon Schama

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Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory
“An extraordinary book. . . . Schama’s range of reference is enormous. . . . Landscape and
Memory is a continual delight, learned [and] full of elegant riffs ... an impressive enrich­
ment of the general sensibility.” —Chicago Tribune
“Deserves to become a classic. . . . Schama is one of those rare, imaginative historians who
introduce the reader to a kind of yesteryear they never dreamed existed.” —Time
“Landscape and Memory will inform and haunt, chasten and enrage its readers. It is that
rarest of commodities in our cultural marketplace, a work of genuine originality.”
—The New Republic
“A bold journey across thirty centuries and four continents. . . . Schama manages his tour
de force with extravagant wit [and] copious detail.” —Washington Post Book World
“This is one of the most intelligent, original, stimulating, self-indulgent, perverse, and irre­
sistibly enjoyable books that I have ever had the delight of reviewing.”
—Philip Ziegler, The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Dazzling . . . brilliant and stirring . . . rich and stimulating. . . . Propelled by Schama’s
sparkling style, the book springs along like a deer in the woods.” —Boston Globe
“Far-ranging . . . ambitiously disheveled. ... By giving chance and accident major roles in
history, Schama is also making room for other unpredictable things—passion, personal­
ity, charisma, eloquence, art, sex. His history . . . allows individual human beings in all
their clumsy complexity back on stage.” —New York magazine
“History needs its singers of epic tales, and Schama . . . aims to oblige. . . . [He] has
devoured libraries in shaping this . . . rich, purposeful study. . . . Few historians have made
ancient places come alive so well. . . . Superbly illustrated . . . immensely entertaining.”
—The Nation
“A writer whose story-telling skills, descriptive power, imagination and verve make a com­
parison with Kipling by no means absurd.. . . Vivid, elaborate, unashamedly colorful. . . .
Readers will continue to derive pleasure from this remarkable book, so ambitious in concep­
tion, so consistendy entertaining in execution.” —New York Review of Books
ALSO BY SIMON SCHAMA
Patriots and Liberators: Revolution
in the Netherlands 1780-1813
Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation
of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)
Simon Schama
Landscape and Memory
Simon Schama was born in London, in 1945, and since 1966
has taught history at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard uni­
versities. He is now Old Dominion Foundation Professor of
the Humanities in the departments of art history and history at
Columbia University. He is the prize-winning author of Patri­
ots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813;
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Cul­
ture in the Golden Age; Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Rev­
olution; and Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations).
He is also the writer-presenter of historical and art-historical
documentaries for BBC television and art critic at The New
Yorker. He lives outside New York City with his wife and two
children.

L
a n d s c a p e
AND
M
e m o r y
SIMON SCHAMA
VINTAGE BOOKS
A Division of Random House, Inc. / New York
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1996
Copyright © 1995 by Simon Schama
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New Tork. Originally published in hardcover by
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1999.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition asf ollows:
Schama, Simon.
Landscape and memory/Simon Schama — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
isbn 0-679-40299-1
1. Landscape—History. 2. Landscape assessment—History.
3. Human ecology—History. I. Title.
GF30.S33 1994
304.2'3—dc20 93-48346 CIP
Vintage isbn: 0-679-73912-7
Book design by Iris Weinstein
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
Printed in the United States of America
FOR CHLOE AND GABRIEL
It is in vain to dream of a wildness
distant from ourselves. There is none such.
It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the
primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires
that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of
Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess
of Concord, i.e. than I import into it.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
Journal, August 30, 1856
Contents
Introduction 3
part one Wood
Prologue The Detour 23
chapter one In the Realm of the Lithuanian Bison
i The Royal Beasts of Bialowieza 37
ii The Last Foray 53
iii Mortality, Immortality 61
chapter two Der Holzweg: The Track Through the Woods
i The Hunt for Germania 75
ii Blood in the Forest 81
iii Arminius Redivivus 100
iv Waldsterben 120
chapter three The Liberties of the Greenwood
i Green Men 135
ii Living in the Woods: Laws and Outlaws 142
iii Hearts of Oak and Bulwarkso f Liberty? 153
iv The Pillars of Gaul 174
v In Extremis 179