Helen Gordon

“There's a pleasure in knowing the names of things. It's not about a need to categorise the world, sectioning it into little boxes. And clearly you don't have to know the names of rocks - or trees or plants or birds - in order to enjoy a landscape. But if you do have this information, something changes about the way you exist in that space. A named landscape thickens. It's to do with history and context but also, I think, with the quality of attention. To assign something its name, you need to take the time to pick out identifying features. You look for longer. And the more you know, the more things stop being a backdrop - blurred, indistinguishable, hurried over - and become somehow more present in the view, more insistently themselves, the way a familiar face stands out in a crowd.”
― Helen Gordon, Notes from Deep Time