Forests

Two people have now told me that Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests. The Shadow of Civilization (Univ Chicago Press, 1992) is a must read. And so I have finally got my hands on it.

Here’s from the introduction:

The story is full of enigmas and paradoxes. If forests appear in our religions as places of profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they have typically been considered places of lawlessness, they have also provided havens for those who took up the cause of justice and fought the law’s corruption. If they evoke associations of danger and abandon in our minds, they also evoke scenes of enchantment. In other words, in the relilgions, mythologies, and literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray. Or where our subjective categories are confounded. Or where perceptions become promiscious with one another, disclosing latent dimensions of time and consciousness. In the forest the inanimate may suddenly become animate, the god turns into a beast, the outlaw stands for justice. Rosalind appears as a boy, the virtuous knight degenerates into a wild man, the straight line forms a circle, the ordinary gives way to the fabulous. . . .the forest, in its enduring antiquity, was the correlate of the poet’s memory, and once its remnants were gone, the poet would fall into oblivion. [pp x-xi]

The forests of Kentucky were, of course, the birthplace of one of this nation’s founding myths — the American Adam. Certainly the settling of Kentucky is full of enigmas and paradoxes, not the least of them being Daniel Boone, a man who was instrumental in destroying the Transylvanian forests that he loved and that provided him with such livelihood as he had.