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Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
In this wide-ranging exploration of the role of forests in Western thought, Robert Pogue Harrison enriches our understanding not only of the forest's place in the cultural imagination of the West, but also of the ecological dilemmas that now confront us so urgently. Consistently insightful and beautifully written, this work is especially compelling at a time when the forest, as a source of wonder, respect, and meaning, disappears daily from the earth.
"Forests is one of the most remarkable essays on the human place in nature I have ever read, and belongs on the small shelf that includes Raymond Williams' masterpiece, The Country and the City. Elegantly conceived, beautifully written, and powerfully argued, [Forests] is a model of scholarship at its passionate best. No one who cares about cultural history, about the human place in nature, or about the future of our earthly home, should miss it.—William Cronon, Yale Review
"Forests is, among other things, a work of scholarship, and one of immense value . . . one that we have needed. It can be read and reread, added to and commented on for some time to come."—John Haines, The New York Times Book Review
"Forests is one of the most remarkable essays on the human place in nature I have ever read, and belongs on the small shelf that includes Raymond Williams' masterpiece, The Country and the City. Elegantly conceived, beautifully written, and powerfully argued, [Forests] is a model of scholarship at its passionate best. No one who cares about cultural history, about the human place in nature, or about the future of our earthly home, should miss it.—William Cronon, Yale Review
"Forests is, among other things, a work of scholarship, and one of immense value . . . one that we have needed. It can be read and reread, added to and commented on for some time to come."—John Haines, The New York Times Book Review
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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About the author
Robert Pogue Harrison
14 books42 followersRobert Pogue Harrison is a critic, radio host, and the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University. His most recent book is Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 40 reviews
July 30, 2012
I am glad I read this, as it helped me see how my own personal confusion and aspirations with regard to nature are aligned with larger historical trends. Although the book is often delightful and inspiring, it sometimes felt like a slog in cases where he follows an overly academic path into the branches of his argument. His quest is to explore the themes that forest plays in the Western cultural imagination and organize it in a manner that reveals the terrible predicament we are in and prospects for a path out of the woods. He succeeds wonderfully in this goal, distilling centuries of historical, artistic, and philosophical thought on the subject into a coherent set of conclusions.
Starting with the oldest Western literature, such Gilgamesh and Homer and classical Greek and Roman mythologies, philosophies, and dramas, Harrison covers early conceptions of forest as a site for dangerous quests, of refuge, or spiritual transformation. He spends quite a bit of effort digesting conceptions of “nature” gods such as Artemis and Dionysus for clues to the dialectic between human society in the civilized towns and agricultural clearings versus the more spiritual or ecstatic human activities in the wild of the forests. With Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, we get a bit of a circle, as the pathway beyond the dark wood and up the mountain is achieved by passing down through Purgatory, then back up into different, more Edenic, type of woods. With the pervasive success of Christianity, the gods of nature are banished, and the place which humans strive to reach is beyond the earth.
Since the Enlightenment, when rationality gained ascendancy, we have been left with a pervasive sense of alienation and nihilism due to consideration of forests and nature predominantly from the perspective of utilitarian and economic value. From the time of the Norman conquest, the concept of forest emerged as a nature preserve for the exclusive use of royalty for their pleasure and ritualistic hunts. By the period of Charlemagne, the word ‘forest’ emerges for the first time as a judicial term extending the Latin meaning of ‘foris’ as ‘outside’ with ‘forestare’ meaning ‘to place off limits’. Whereas this institutionalization of wild spaces included both plants and animals (“vert and venison”), the “enlightened” view of forests in Diderot’s Encyclopedia considers only efficient production of usable wood in fulfillment of man’s rights of mastery and possession of nature.
For the intervening centuries since then, Harrison captures in the cultural record of the arts the themes of nostalgia and the struggle to advance a promising way for humans to live in relation with nature (the meaning of the word ‘ecology’ in his analysis). Favorite figures include Rousseau, the poets John Claire and Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Thoreau, Constable, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The journey of this book represents a profound accomplishment, all leading to the current situation: “We can say today that a war is being waged in the United States between … two fundamentally opposed concepts of forest. One is the concept of forest as resource; the other of the forest as sanctuary.” Near the end he points out the unfortunate situation of conservationists having to speak the language of resource managers, such as valuing biodiversity for its prospects of human medicines. An advance of ecology since this was written in the early 90’s is our current knowledge of the “value” of biodiversity as genetic reservoir for adaptations of species to environmental change.
With apologies for the length of this review, I end with a few eloquent quotes:
“Humanity begins to appear in a new light: as a species caught in the delicate and diverse web of a forestlike planetary environment. More precisely, we are beginning to appear to ourselves as a species of parasite which threatens to destroy the hosting organism as a whole.”
“The entire history we have recounted so far could be seen as the history of human outsideness. Because we exist foremost outside of ourselves, forests become like an ancient and enduring correlate of our transcendence. And because our imagination is a measure of our ecstasies, the history of forests in the Western imagination turns into the story of our self-dispossession.”
“Somewhere we still sense—who knows for how much longer?—that we make ourselves at home only in our estrangement, or in the logos of the finite. In the cultural memory of the West forests ‘correspond’ to the exteriority of the logos. The outlaws, the heroes, the wanderers, the lovers, the saints, the persecuted, the outcasts, the bewildered, the ecstatic—these are among those who have sought out the forest’s asylum in the history we have followed throughout this book. Without such outside domains, there is no inside in which to dwell.”
Starting with the oldest Western literature, such Gilgamesh and Homer and classical Greek and Roman mythologies, philosophies, and dramas, Harrison covers early conceptions of forest as a site for dangerous quests, of refuge, or spiritual transformation. He spends quite a bit of effort digesting conceptions of “nature” gods such as Artemis and Dionysus for clues to the dialectic between human society in the civilized towns and agricultural clearings versus the more spiritual or ecstatic human activities in the wild of the forests. With Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, we get a bit of a circle, as the pathway beyond the dark wood and up the mountain is achieved by passing down through Purgatory, then back up into different, more Edenic, type of woods. With the pervasive success of Christianity, the gods of nature are banished, and the place which humans strive to reach is beyond the earth.
Since the Enlightenment, when rationality gained ascendancy, we have been left with a pervasive sense of alienation and nihilism due to consideration of forests and nature predominantly from the perspective of utilitarian and economic value. From the time of the Norman conquest, the concept of forest emerged as a nature preserve for the exclusive use of royalty for their pleasure and ritualistic hunts. By the period of Charlemagne, the word ‘forest’ emerges for the first time as a judicial term extending the Latin meaning of ‘foris’ as ‘outside’ with ‘forestare’ meaning ‘to place off limits’. Whereas this institutionalization of wild spaces included both plants and animals (“vert and venison”), the “enlightened” view of forests in Diderot’s Encyclopedia considers only efficient production of usable wood in fulfillment of man’s rights of mastery and possession of nature.
For the intervening centuries since then, Harrison captures in the cultural record of the arts the themes of nostalgia and the struggle to advance a promising way for humans to live in relation with nature (the meaning of the word ‘ecology’ in his analysis). Favorite figures include Rousseau, the poets John Claire and Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Thoreau, Constable, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The journey of this book represents a profound accomplishment, all leading to the current situation: “We can say today that a war is being waged in the United States between … two fundamentally opposed concepts of forest. One is the concept of forest as resource; the other of the forest as sanctuary.” Near the end he points out the unfortunate situation of conservationists having to speak the language of resource managers, such as valuing biodiversity for its prospects of human medicines. An advance of ecology since this was written in the early 90’s is our current knowledge of the “value” of biodiversity as genetic reservoir for adaptations of species to environmental change.
With apologies for the length of this review, I end with a few eloquent quotes:
“Humanity begins to appear in a new light: as a species caught in the delicate and diverse web of a forestlike planetary environment. More precisely, we are beginning to appear to ourselves as a species of parasite which threatens to destroy the hosting organism as a whole.”
“The entire history we have recounted so far could be seen as the history of human outsideness. Because we exist foremost outside of ourselves, forests become like an ancient and enduring correlate of our transcendence. And because our imagination is a measure of our ecstasies, the history of forests in the Western imagination turns into the story of our self-dispossession.”
“Somewhere we still sense—who knows for how much longer?—that we make ourselves at home only in our estrangement, or in the logos of the finite. In the cultural memory of the West forests ‘correspond’ to the exteriority of the logos. The outlaws, the heroes, the wanderers, the lovers, the saints, the persecuted, the outcasts, the bewildered, the ecstatic—these are among those who have sought out the forest’s asylum in the history we have followed throughout this book. Without such outside domains, there is no inside in which to dwell.”
September 4, 2012
Wow this guy is really into forests
January 19, 2009
Forests is one of the first ecocritical works I ever encountered. I devoured it the June prior to arriving in Nevada to begin my graduate study, reading it more or less in one sitting in a very long car trip to Oklahoma and back. Few, if any, works by scholars have stuck with me as resolutely and stubbornly as Harrison’s. While his central premise—the exploration of the cultural meaning and uses of forests through several centuries of Western thinking and literature—seems distantly removed from much of my current reading, I often return to Forests for its luminous, brilliant, and dense prose. It is a book that makes me think hard about my own writing. It is often Harrison’s voice that I hear in my head when I attempt to craft my own readings, and the book has been extremely influential on the way I work formally. While written in a formal register (Harrison rarely veers from the plural first person), the book is simultaneously warm, friendly, dense, and philosophically engaging. I admire how he is able to construct critical leitmotifs and create apt metaphors that illuminate the works he reads, which cover an astonishing array of genres and literary periods. Harrison also articulates a savvy mode of thinking about the culture/nature dialectic in his gorgeous exploration of Thoreau’s sense of “dwelling” at Walden: “Nature is the setting of this [Thoreau’s:] exteriority, if only because it is that to which we remain external. It is only in our relationship to what we are not that what we are may finally become the ground of our dwelling. Nature is where we go to get lost, so that we find again that which in us is irrevocable” (227).
January 21, 2011
The first half of this book is great (up to chapter 4). Lots of fascinating analysis of the way in which the perception of forests changed throughout the centurites. Then the second half happens.
January 6, 2022
Review title: Where the wild things are
At the end of the road, at the edge of the horizon, lurks the forest, a heart of darkness where wild things live, at least in the imagination. And Forests is a fascinating study of how the idea of the forest has shaped human culture, philosophy, and literature through history.
From classical antiquity (think Roman and Greek civilizations) the forest was a place of darkness that obscured the sky wherein dwelled the gods and since then "we have been a civilization of sky-worshippers, children of a celestial father. Where divinity had been identified with the sky, or with the eternal geometry of the stars, or with cosmic infinity, or with 'heaven,' the forests become monstrous, for they hide the prospect of God.." (p. 6). And in the Mediterranean world then densely forested on all its shores, the forests were barriers creating isolation on the one side--"obstacles--to conquest, hegemony, homogenization"--and enablers of "cultural independence" on the other, by their very qualities of isolation enabling communities to develop and localizing "the spirit of place". Each place had its own "spirits and deities, fauns and nymphs, local to this place and no other. Through these local inhabitants the forests preserved the spirit of difference between the here and the there, between this place and that place." (p. 51)
The Jehovah of Judaism commanded the nation of Israel to destroy the forests in the lands they possessed (Harrison cites Deut. 7:5 and 12:3) and the classic Greco-Roman religions posited life as a fated tragedy whose end was predetermined and "against which the tragic hero was powerless" (p. 64). But Christianity introduced the possibility of comedy--a happy ending--through redemption, a redemption that was not just personal but involved "the redemption of the earth as a whole, not merely its transcendence." (p. 87). The forest was no longer a place to be destroyed or worshipped but a place that would be redeemed in the New Heaven and New Earth in the future documented in the book of Revelation. Of course, Harrison points out, the symbol and capital of this New Earth is a massive city, laid out geometrically, not a forest with its meandering paths and abhorrence of straight lines.
In medieval times, the "forest" became a legal term for "land placed off limits by a royal decree." (p. 69). Harrison references the extraordinary Treatise of the Laws of the Forest, written in 1592 by the appropriately named John Manwood, who as a game keeper and judge of English royal forests was basically defining the scope and duties of his job. The forests he was defining were not any tract of wild trees, but consisted specifically of "vert and venizen"--the trees and plants that sheltered game animals like deer, fox, and rabbits, but not "ravenous beasts" like wolves who would attack and kill game--and the "particular laws and proper officers" who were "appointed that the same may be better preserved for a place of recreation for kings and princes." (p. 72-73)
In this world, forests were no longer wild and dangerous, but also no longer open to all and outside the bounds of legal jurisprudence as in earlier millenia. In fact, Manwood took care to distinguish between woods and forests. The forest was now a resource to be governed by kings, an idea that by the 19th century and the rise of free market capitalism had turned the forest into a resource to be used to generate wealth. The modern scientific discipline of forestry reduced the forests a volume of useful wood via "forest mathematics" (p. 108), a concept of utility which continues today even when "utility is conceived in aesthetic terms; forests as recreational parks, for example, or as" museums"of original nature." Writing in 1992, Harrison perfectly captures the present-day tug of war between environmentalists who speak the language of parks and museums and developers who think in forest mathematics.
As the forests have receded from the landscape, Harrison documents the rise of forests as nostalgia (Walden and Wordsworth--"And 'tis my faith that every flower/Enjoys the air it breathes", p. 157), fairy tale (the Brothers Grimm, p. 164ff), and even fascist nationalism (20th century German fatherland, p. 175-177). His focus has been resolutely literary, somewhat to its detriment in failing to devote more thought and development of the social, cultural, and historical narratives driven by and written about forests. It is near the end of his study that he turns to consider etymology. The word "ecology" is based on the root Greek words oikos meaning "house" or "abode" and logos which "is usually translated as 'language,' but more originally it means 'relation.' " (p. 200-201). In this definition, says Harrison, the word ecology "names the universal human manner of being in the world." We live in the world but outside the forest. "we have even found that the word itself, foresta, means literally' outside.' The entire history we have recounted so far could be seen as the story of human outsideness." (p. 201)
After considering several other word roots and translations, Harrison concludes that "no amount of words can adequately say what logos means with regard to the relation between forests and human dwelling." (p. 202). But I am drawn back to his discussion on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and his summation that the destruction "of the earth on a planetary scale--the global assault on the frontiers of nature and non-Western cultures--gives a hollow resonance to all prior rhetoric of the cross, all traditional codes of morality, and all private conceptions about the good and honorable. " (p. 143). We have sinned against the God who created the forests and was not coincidentally identified as the Logos in John 1:1, so we irretrievably under this Heaven and on this Earth live outside the forest with hearts of darkness, but with the possibility of the happy ending of redemption capable of living in harmony with Him and it--if we will.
If that sounds too literary for a book about Forests, that is how this book will make you think after reading it. It may not have some of the social, cultural, and historical narratives you expected, but those are available in other books. This book takes you into the forest of the mind and the soul where the wild things are.
At the end of the road, at the edge of the horizon, lurks the forest, a heart of darkness where wild things live, at least in the imagination. And Forests is a fascinating study of how the idea of the forest has shaped human culture, philosophy, and literature through history.
From classical antiquity (think Roman and Greek civilizations) the forest was a place of darkness that obscured the sky wherein dwelled the gods and since then "we have been a civilization of sky-worshippers, children of a celestial father. Where divinity had been identified with the sky, or with the eternal geometry of the stars, or with cosmic infinity, or with 'heaven,' the forests become monstrous, for they hide the prospect of God.." (p. 6). And in the Mediterranean world then densely forested on all its shores, the forests were barriers creating isolation on the one side--"obstacles--to conquest, hegemony, homogenization"--and enablers of "cultural independence" on the other, by their very qualities of isolation enabling communities to develop and localizing "the spirit of place". Each place had its own "spirits and deities, fauns and nymphs, local to this place and no other. Through these local inhabitants the forests preserved the spirit of difference between the here and the there, between this place and that place." (p. 51)
The Jehovah of Judaism commanded the nation of Israel to destroy the forests in the lands they possessed (Harrison cites Deut. 7:5 and 12:3) and the classic Greco-Roman religions posited life as a fated tragedy whose end was predetermined and "against which the tragic hero was powerless" (p. 64). But Christianity introduced the possibility of comedy--a happy ending--through redemption, a redemption that was not just personal but involved "the redemption of the earth as a whole, not merely its transcendence." (p. 87). The forest was no longer a place to be destroyed or worshipped but a place that would be redeemed in the New Heaven and New Earth in the future documented in the book of Revelation. Of course, Harrison points out, the symbol and capital of this New Earth is a massive city, laid out geometrically, not a forest with its meandering paths and abhorrence of straight lines.
In medieval times, the "forest" became a legal term for "land placed off limits by a royal decree." (p. 69). Harrison references the extraordinary Treatise of the Laws of the Forest, written in 1592 by the appropriately named John Manwood, who as a game keeper and judge of English royal forests was basically defining the scope and duties of his job. The forests he was defining were not any tract of wild trees, but consisted specifically of "vert and venizen"--the trees and plants that sheltered game animals like deer, fox, and rabbits, but not "ravenous beasts" like wolves who would attack and kill game--and the "particular laws and proper officers" who were "appointed that the same may be better preserved for a place of recreation for kings and princes." (p. 72-73)
In this world, forests were no longer wild and dangerous, but also no longer open to all and outside the bounds of legal jurisprudence as in earlier millenia. In fact, Manwood took care to distinguish between woods and forests. The forest was now a resource to be governed by kings, an idea that by the 19th century and the rise of free market capitalism had turned the forest into a resource to be used to generate wealth. The modern scientific discipline of forestry reduced the forests a volume of useful wood via "forest mathematics" (p. 108), a concept of utility which continues today even when "utility is conceived in aesthetic terms; forests as recreational parks, for example, or as" museums"of original nature." Writing in 1992, Harrison perfectly captures the present-day tug of war between environmentalists who speak the language of parks and museums and developers who think in forest mathematics.
As the forests have receded from the landscape, Harrison documents the rise of forests as nostalgia (Walden and Wordsworth--"And 'tis my faith that every flower/Enjoys the air it breathes", p. 157), fairy tale (the Brothers Grimm, p. 164ff), and even fascist nationalism (20th century German fatherland, p. 175-177). His focus has been resolutely literary, somewhat to its detriment in failing to devote more thought and development of the social, cultural, and historical narratives driven by and written about forests. It is near the end of his study that he turns to consider etymology. The word "ecology" is based on the root Greek words oikos meaning "house" or "abode" and logos which "is usually translated as 'language,' but more originally it means 'relation.' " (p. 200-201). In this definition, says Harrison, the word ecology "names the universal human manner of being in the world." We live in the world but outside the forest. "we have even found that the word itself, foresta, means literally' outside.' The entire history we have recounted so far could be seen as the story of human outsideness." (p. 201)
After considering several other word roots and translations, Harrison concludes that "no amount of words can adequately say what logos means with regard to the relation between forests and human dwelling." (p. 202). But I am drawn back to his discussion on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and his summation that the destruction "of the earth on a planetary scale--the global assault on the frontiers of nature and non-Western cultures--gives a hollow resonance to all prior rhetoric of the cross, all traditional codes of morality, and all private conceptions about the good and honorable. " (p. 143). We have sinned against the God who created the forests and was not coincidentally identified as the Logos in John 1:1, so we irretrievably under this Heaven and on this Earth live outside the forest with hearts of darkness, but with the possibility of the happy ending of redemption capable of living in harmony with Him and it--if we will.
If that sounds too literary for a book about Forests, that is how this book will make you think after reading it. It may not have some of the social, cultural, and historical narratives you expected, but those are available in other books. This book takes you into the forest of the mind and the soul where the wild things are.
April 5, 2024
Harrison’s prose reads like a slow, but rewarding, stroll through a dense forest of ontology, language, and arboreal voice. This took forever to read, but it completely altered the way I read and interpret language & perceive the sprawling influence of the forests. “Dwelling” was my favorite chapter.
Some of my favorite moments:
“We dwell not in nature but in the relation to nature. We do not inhabit the earth but inhabit our excess of the earth. We dwell not in the forest but in an exteriority with regard to its closure. We do not subsist as much as transcend. To be human means to be always and already outside of the forest’s inclusion.”
“When we do not speak our death to the world we speak death to the world. And when we speak death to the world, the forest’s legend falls silent.”
Some of my favorite moments:
“We dwell not in nature but in the relation to nature. We do not inhabit the earth but inhabit our excess of the earth. We dwell not in the forest but in an exteriority with regard to its closure. We do not subsist as much as transcend. To be human means to be always and already outside of the forest’s inclusion.”
“When we do not speak our death to the world we speak death to the world. And when we speak death to the world, the forest’s legend falls silent.”
January 18, 2021
This is a literary and philosophical analysis of forests in Western tradition. It is highly learned and often insightful, but I am a bit troubled by the way it fails to distinguish among different kinds of forests. It says almost nothing about the arboreal composition of forests and the ways they have evolved, with or without human intervention, over centuries and millennia. The forest is viewed rather anthropocentrically as a source of meditations on human destiny. At times, when Harrison discusses works by authors such as Shelley or Sartre that are only very peripherally related to the theme, the forest is little more than an excuse to discourse on literature.
April 26, 2020
In his book “Forests”, Prof. Harrison has produced a discussion of forests seen in a wide cultural context. The book is a strong blend of fact, mythology and fable, literature, religion, and history. As a commentator on cultural matters, Harrison is outstanding. And although “Forests” was published almost thirty years ago, it offers reading today that is fresh, deep, comprehensive, and stimulating.
“Forests” consists of five long chapters and an Epilogue, and focusses on the Western world. Each of the chapters considers an age, or a period in the story of people and their forests. What Harrison seeks as he examines each of these periods is to characterise the earth’s forests and how they were or are viewed. The world’s forests then become a shadow, a reflection, a complement, and perhaps an unconscious repository of the images, or what people saw as the reality and the idea, of a forest. Included among these images are the forest viewed in terms of a refuge, a threat, an impediment, a uni-dimensional source of utility, and as something playing background, foreground, and middle ground to the complex notion of abode.
For someone like me, raised on the edge of a village but also on the edge of a large pine forest, Harrison’s first chapter brought back some of my early mental images, delightful but inchoate, of ‘forest’, images that seemed always to infuse my early boyhood. My pine forest was large enough that from the inside it seemed boundless, a place where I could walk for hours with my dog, the dog being my assurance of never being lost, since he could always find his way home unerringly. So I was free to tread silently over thick beds of fallen pine needles, breathe in the heady scent of terpenes, and listen to the pines as they sighed quietly to one another. It was all very primal, although that word was unknown to me back then. The image returned many times as I was reading “Forests”.
Skipping forward several decades, my many trips to Germany have taken me more than once to the Black Forest. There, the walking routes known as the Clock Carriers Way, lead through deep forests, where the trees grow thickly and the light can be dim, offers some strenuous sections, passes some impossibly lovely villages, and surprises walkers occasionally by leading them suddenly into clearings. If one is lucky, one of these clearings will have a fairy ring, and such an encounter is made exquisite by even a little knowledge of the mythology associated with these magic rings of mushrooms. As one reads “Forests”, mythology sidebars like this appear embedded in the text of the first chapter.
To come now to a discussion of “Forests” that involves less personal indulgence, the five chapters fall into distinct groupings. The first three chapters (entitled First The Forests, Shadows Of Law, and Enlightenment) range over a vast period, from prehistory up to the modern world. The first chapter deals with prehistory and antiquity. The second chapter covers an indefinite period, perhaps a thousand years, up to a bit beyond the Renaissance. The title of chapter three (Enlightenment) might appear to be a give away, but in fact it extends into the twentieth century.
There is so much material in any of these chapters that an easy encapsulation is impossible. So I have chosen one sub-section from each of these chapters as a means, however unsatisfactory, of giving some idea of the richness of Harrison’s material.
One of the sub-sections of Chapter 1 is entitled The Sorrows of Rhea Silvia. This relates to the mythical woman of the same name, a vestal virgin and daughter of a king of Alba Longa, a place considered to be the mother city of Rome. Despite her vestal status, Rhea Silvia is violated by Mars and becomes the mother of Romulus and Remus. Rhea Sylvia, of the Sylvan family, makes the connection to forests evident. And here Harrison presents a good deal of material associated with Rome’s beginnings, including undomesticated forests having the status in ancient Roman law of res nullius (belonging to no one), and of such forests being referred to as locus neminis (place of no one), and the speculation that the Latin word nemus (woodland) comes from nemo (no one). We find that the root for our word ‘forest’ and similar words in other European languages, is not ancient and that it originated much later, in Merovingian times.
Shadows of Love is the title of a sub-section in Chapter 2, and deals with the stories for the fifth day in Boccaccio’s Decameron. These stories relate to a complex tale of two people becoming lost in the forest and the wild chain of events that unfold subsequently.
Chapter 3 is a great sprawling exploration of ideas and attitudes stretching across the approximately three hundred years from the early 1600s to the early 1900s. The story begins at Descartes, moves on to Immanuel Kant, discusses the beginnings of modern forestry in Germany, and concludes with long entries on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joseph Conrad, Jean Paul Sartre, and ends with glances at T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. I won’t attempt to summarise or even describe the mass of material that Harrison unpacks here, nor how it ties into the theme of forests.
Through these first three chapters, Harrison traces how the general view of forests evolved. In chapter 1, forests are trackless; they extend across very large parts of Europe, and their interiors are unknown places. In chapter 2, we begin to see forests circumscribed, but in the sense that they became areas set aside as private reserves for kings. As such, forests offered a sanctuary, enforced by royal edict, for game animals of all sorts, protected for the king’s private enjoyment, and areas where trespassing, removal of wood, and especially poaching by commoners were serious offences. In chapter 3, we begin to enter the modern world. Forests start to lose their mystique. Deforestation had been ongoing since ancient times, but during the time covered by this chapter the pace really picked up. In the end, the magic had left forests for many people, especially the exploiters, for whom a forest was just a resource, something there for their use, in whatever way they saw fit to use it.
Chapters 4 and 5 are, for me, of great interest. Harrison states in his later book, “Gardens”, “I tend to favour revelation over demonstration, embodied figures over analytical concepts, and the discernment of poets over the disquisitions of philosophers”. That approach is very much evident in “Forests”.
Through the first three chapters, Harrison uses poetry and literature freely to centre, to support, or to supplement his discussion. The long descriptions at the end of chapter 3 of the work and outlooks of Rousseau, Conrad, Sartre, and Eliot are a good extended example of this.
Chapter 4 is simply enthralling, and the title of this chapter, Forests of Nostalgia, is apt. The chapter begins with a picture, a reproduction of one of Caspar David Friedrich’s evocative paintings, Winter Landscape with Church. Harrison concludes the first paragraph of this chapter with the following sentences:
“The countercurrent of Enlightenment’s drive to inherit the future is nostalgia. As the ancestors fall silent in their graves; as the age-old traditions and landscapes of the past recede into vanishing horizons; and as the sense of historical detachment begins to doubt its original optimism – nostalgia becomes an irrevocable emotion of the post-Christian era.”
Harrison then launches into a discussion of some of the poetry of Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Leopardi, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Shelley, and the prose of Robert Musil. This stuff is just pure gold.
But between Wordsworth and Baudelaire, Harrison devotes thirteen densely packed pages to a discussion of The Brothers Grimm, their work, and its significance. Here, one could spend many hours chasing down threads in other books, such as Peter Watson’s “The German Genius”, the academic works of Steven Ozment, and the many compilations of articles on German history. I feel invited to do this simply because Harrison’s text is so rich and compressed. The Brothers Grimm are of undoubted importance. Since its publication in the nineteenth century, their book “Children’s and Household Tales” is reported to be the world’s best-selling book after the Bible. The Grimms’ collections of stories have spawned an entire industry, involving studies that view their work from every possible angle. And in many of these stories, forests appear prominently. How well supported is Harrison’s argument that forests have a unique and powerful place in German history and the German psyche? Not sure. But the prospect of pursuing this does appeal.
Chapter 5 (Dwelling) also begins with a painting, John Constable’s Trees at Hampstead: The Path to the Church. Another Constable painting appears a few pages into this chapter, Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree. (One really should go online to examine images of these paintings. In the book, they are shown in black and white erasing the impact from Constable’s colours, and too much detail is lost in the printing.) For this chapter, as with the previous four, any summary of mine would be fatally defective, so I will default here to two of Harrison’s paragraphs.
“From the very outset of this study, which began with antiquity and arrived at Molloy’s ditch of historical paralysis, we have seen in how many ways the forest remains a margin of exteriority with respect to civilization. We even found that the word itself, foresta, means literally “outside”. The entire history we have recounted so far could be seen as the story of human outsidedness. Because we exist first and foremost outside of ourselves, forests become something like an ancient and enduring correlate of our transcendence. And because our imagination is a measure of our ecstasis, the history of forests in the Western imagination turns into the story of our self-dispossession.
“The task that remains for this concluding chapter is to come to terms with the radical nature of this outsidedness and to determine in what way it grounds human dwelling on the earth. In what follows we will approach forests from a new perspective and seek to define more rigorously the relation between the human abode and nature as such. We will find that the relation is the abode, and that this relation remains one of estrangement from, as well as domestic familiarity with, the earth. This will oblige us to ask what it means to “be at home” on the earth in the mode of estrangement.”
From here, Harrison embarks first on a fairly detailed discussion of John Constable and his work, focussing on the two paintings referred to above, and then on the poet John Clare and his life and poetry. These forays into the work of a visual artist and a poet yield contrasting insights into what forests mean. It was of interest to me, not being a citizen of the United States, to see Harrison spend time discussing Thoreau’s experience at Walden. Living next to the US, being able to peer in at it, one can’t avoid the sense of its vastness, its variety, its contrasts, and its extremes. I am reproducing below a small section of Harrison’s text on Thoreau and Walden.
“Society depends on our natural disposition to assume what we are told: that the gods are of such and such a nature, that the “good” lies in this or that direction, that we are on the earth to meet a set of obligations. We feast or starve at the table of laws, being believers. Sometimes we even believe in “freedom”. Freedom too is a rumor, as long as one merely believes in it. The pilgrims who set off for America sought in their separation from the European homeland a margin of freedom from the old tyrannies and prejudices of tradition. They arrived on a forested continent, a “well-wooded land”, and undertook an experiment in independence. To what did it lead? To more parishes of the predicted and predictable. Concretely speaking, to an even more insidious enslavement to nationhood, property, economy, industry, spectacle, and the monstrous institution of rumor called the press.”
In the end, Harrison finds that the experience of forests in the US follows a different trajectory to that of Europe, but ends up at a similar destination. His discussion of Thoreau and Walden is extensive, and deserves reading in its entirety, rather than being seen through a summary that would be necessarily myopic and limited. It was in the section on Thoreau in particular that a caution flag rose in my mind. Thoreau conducted his Walden experiment more that 160 years ago. Back then, the population was almost entirely rural, the formal social structures were weak to non-existent, but the informal structures, the sense of community and the ability and willingness to act on that sense (e.g. barn raisings), were strong. Today, populations are overwhelmingly urban, the formal social structures (transportation, communications, health care, energy production and distribution, economic activities in general, and education and its spin-offs) are powerful, pervasive, important, and to a great extent essential. To compare in any uncritical way insights gained in Thoreau’s time to today’s needs, or to judge the experience from either time using the standards of the other, would be a poor way to handle things.
Harrison has drawn out valuable insights on the significance to the health of our societies of matters poetical, and provided enough indication that the poetical and the pragmatic are in a continuing struggle in a large grey area. If either is allowed to be eclipsed, we can expect trouble. “Forests” presents a comprehensive discussion of the role and importance of the poetical in our lives, using forests as an indicator of collective spiritual stance and of cultural well-being in general. This sort of discussion, in this mode of presentation, won’t appeal to everyone, but the basic message is too important to be missed.
Having read Harrison’s later book (“Gardens”) first, I looked forward to “Forests” and wasn’t disappointed. The two books are linked in some important ways. I came to the end of “Forests” informed, exhilarated, rejuvenated, and having a list of too many more works that I now feel compelled to read.
“Forests” consists of five long chapters and an Epilogue, and focusses on the Western world. Each of the chapters considers an age, or a period in the story of people and their forests. What Harrison seeks as he examines each of these periods is to characterise the earth’s forests and how they were or are viewed. The world’s forests then become a shadow, a reflection, a complement, and perhaps an unconscious repository of the images, or what people saw as the reality and the idea, of a forest. Included among these images are the forest viewed in terms of a refuge, a threat, an impediment, a uni-dimensional source of utility, and as something playing background, foreground, and middle ground to the complex notion of abode.
For someone like me, raised on the edge of a village but also on the edge of a large pine forest, Harrison’s first chapter brought back some of my early mental images, delightful but inchoate, of ‘forest’, images that seemed always to infuse my early boyhood. My pine forest was large enough that from the inside it seemed boundless, a place where I could walk for hours with my dog, the dog being my assurance of never being lost, since he could always find his way home unerringly. So I was free to tread silently over thick beds of fallen pine needles, breathe in the heady scent of terpenes, and listen to the pines as they sighed quietly to one another. It was all very primal, although that word was unknown to me back then. The image returned many times as I was reading “Forests”.
Skipping forward several decades, my many trips to Germany have taken me more than once to the Black Forest. There, the walking routes known as the Clock Carriers Way, lead through deep forests, where the trees grow thickly and the light can be dim, offers some strenuous sections, passes some impossibly lovely villages, and surprises walkers occasionally by leading them suddenly into clearings. If one is lucky, one of these clearings will have a fairy ring, and such an encounter is made exquisite by even a little knowledge of the mythology associated with these magic rings of mushrooms. As one reads “Forests”, mythology sidebars like this appear embedded in the text of the first chapter.
To come now to a discussion of “Forests” that involves less personal indulgence, the five chapters fall into distinct groupings. The first three chapters (entitled First The Forests, Shadows Of Law, and Enlightenment) range over a vast period, from prehistory up to the modern world. The first chapter deals with prehistory and antiquity. The second chapter covers an indefinite period, perhaps a thousand years, up to a bit beyond the Renaissance. The title of chapter three (Enlightenment) might appear to be a give away, but in fact it extends into the twentieth century.
There is so much material in any of these chapters that an easy encapsulation is impossible. So I have chosen one sub-section from each of these chapters as a means, however unsatisfactory, of giving some idea of the richness of Harrison’s material.
One of the sub-sections of Chapter 1 is entitled The Sorrows of Rhea Silvia. This relates to the mythical woman of the same name, a vestal virgin and daughter of a king of Alba Longa, a place considered to be the mother city of Rome. Despite her vestal status, Rhea Silvia is violated by Mars and becomes the mother of Romulus and Remus. Rhea Sylvia, of the Sylvan family, makes the connection to forests evident. And here Harrison presents a good deal of material associated with Rome’s beginnings, including undomesticated forests having the status in ancient Roman law of res nullius (belonging to no one), and of such forests being referred to as locus neminis (place of no one), and the speculation that the Latin word nemus (woodland) comes from nemo (no one). We find that the root for our word ‘forest’ and similar words in other European languages, is not ancient and that it originated much later, in Merovingian times.
Shadows of Love is the title of a sub-section in Chapter 2, and deals with the stories for the fifth day in Boccaccio’s Decameron. These stories relate to a complex tale of two people becoming lost in the forest and the wild chain of events that unfold subsequently.
Chapter 3 is a great sprawling exploration of ideas and attitudes stretching across the approximately three hundred years from the early 1600s to the early 1900s. The story begins at Descartes, moves on to Immanuel Kant, discusses the beginnings of modern forestry in Germany, and concludes with long entries on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joseph Conrad, Jean Paul Sartre, and ends with glances at T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. I won’t attempt to summarise or even describe the mass of material that Harrison unpacks here, nor how it ties into the theme of forests.
Through these first three chapters, Harrison traces how the general view of forests evolved. In chapter 1, forests are trackless; they extend across very large parts of Europe, and their interiors are unknown places. In chapter 2, we begin to see forests circumscribed, but in the sense that they became areas set aside as private reserves for kings. As such, forests offered a sanctuary, enforced by royal edict, for game animals of all sorts, protected for the king’s private enjoyment, and areas where trespassing, removal of wood, and especially poaching by commoners were serious offences. In chapter 3, we begin to enter the modern world. Forests start to lose their mystique. Deforestation had been ongoing since ancient times, but during the time covered by this chapter the pace really picked up. In the end, the magic had left forests for many people, especially the exploiters, for whom a forest was just a resource, something there for their use, in whatever way they saw fit to use it.
Chapters 4 and 5 are, for me, of great interest. Harrison states in his later book, “Gardens”, “I tend to favour revelation over demonstration, embodied figures over analytical concepts, and the discernment of poets over the disquisitions of philosophers”. That approach is very much evident in “Forests”.
Through the first three chapters, Harrison uses poetry and literature freely to centre, to support, or to supplement his discussion. The long descriptions at the end of chapter 3 of the work and outlooks of Rousseau, Conrad, Sartre, and Eliot are a good extended example of this.
Chapter 4 is simply enthralling, and the title of this chapter, Forests of Nostalgia, is apt. The chapter begins with a picture, a reproduction of one of Caspar David Friedrich’s evocative paintings, Winter Landscape with Church. Harrison concludes the first paragraph of this chapter with the following sentences:
“The countercurrent of Enlightenment’s drive to inherit the future is nostalgia. As the ancestors fall silent in their graves; as the age-old traditions and landscapes of the past recede into vanishing horizons; and as the sense of historical detachment begins to doubt its original optimism – nostalgia becomes an irrevocable emotion of the post-Christian era.”
Harrison then launches into a discussion of some of the poetry of Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Leopardi, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Shelley, and the prose of Robert Musil. This stuff is just pure gold.
But between Wordsworth and Baudelaire, Harrison devotes thirteen densely packed pages to a discussion of The Brothers Grimm, their work, and its significance. Here, one could spend many hours chasing down threads in other books, such as Peter Watson’s “The German Genius”, the academic works of Steven Ozment, and the many compilations of articles on German history. I feel invited to do this simply because Harrison’s text is so rich and compressed. The Brothers Grimm are of undoubted importance. Since its publication in the nineteenth century, their book “Children’s and Household Tales” is reported to be the world’s best-selling book after the Bible. The Grimms’ collections of stories have spawned an entire industry, involving studies that view their work from every possible angle. And in many of these stories, forests appear prominently. How well supported is Harrison’s argument that forests have a unique and powerful place in German history and the German psyche? Not sure. But the prospect of pursuing this does appeal.
Chapter 5 (Dwelling) also begins with a painting, John Constable’s Trees at Hampstead: The Path to the Church. Another Constable painting appears a few pages into this chapter, Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree. (One really should go online to examine images of these paintings. In the book, they are shown in black and white erasing the impact from Constable’s colours, and too much detail is lost in the printing.) For this chapter, as with the previous four, any summary of mine would be fatally defective, so I will default here to two of Harrison’s paragraphs.
“From the very outset of this study, which began with antiquity and arrived at Molloy’s ditch of historical paralysis, we have seen in how many ways the forest remains a margin of exteriority with respect to civilization. We even found that the word itself, foresta, means literally “outside”. The entire history we have recounted so far could be seen as the story of human outsidedness. Because we exist first and foremost outside of ourselves, forests become something like an ancient and enduring correlate of our transcendence. And because our imagination is a measure of our ecstasis, the history of forests in the Western imagination turns into the story of our self-dispossession.
“The task that remains for this concluding chapter is to come to terms with the radical nature of this outsidedness and to determine in what way it grounds human dwelling on the earth. In what follows we will approach forests from a new perspective and seek to define more rigorously the relation between the human abode and nature as such. We will find that the relation is the abode, and that this relation remains one of estrangement from, as well as domestic familiarity with, the earth. This will oblige us to ask what it means to “be at home” on the earth in the mode of estrangement.”
From here, Harrison embarks first on a fairly detailed discussion of John Constable and his work, focussing on the two paintings referred to above, and then on the poet John Clare and his life and poetry. These forays into the work of a visual artist and a poet yield contrasting insights into what forests mean. It was of interest to me, not being a citizen of the United States, to see Harrison spend time discussing Thoreau’s experience at Walden. Living next to the US, being able to peer in at it, one can’t avoid the sense of its vastness, its variety, its contrasts, and its extremes. I am reproducing below a small section of Harrison’s text on Thoreau and Walden.
“Society depends on our natural disposition to assume what we are told: that the gods are of such and such a nature, that the “good” lies in this or that direction, that we are on the earth to meet a set of obligations. We feast or starve at the table of laws, being believers. Sometimes we even believe in “freedom”. Freedom too is a rumor, as long as one merely believes in it. The pilgrims who set off for America sought in their separation from the European homeland a margin of freedom from the old tyrannies and prejudices of tradition. They arrived on a forested continent, a “well-wooded land”, and undertook an experiment in independence. To what did it lead? To more parishes of the predicted and predictable. Concretely speaking, to an even more insidious enslavement to nationhood, property, economy, industry, spectacle, and the monstrous institution of rumor called the press.”
In the end, Harrison finds that the experience of forests in the US follows a different trajectory to that of Europe, but ends up at a similar destination. His discussion of Thoreau and Walden is extensive, and deserves reading in its entirety, rather than being seen through a summary that would be necessarily myopic and limited. It was in the section on Thoreau in particular that a caution flag rose in my mind. Thoreau conducted his Walden experiment more that 160 years ago. Back then, the population was almost entirely rural, the formal social structures were weak to non-existent, but the informal structures, the sense of community and the ability and willingness to act on that sense (e.g. barn raisings), were strong. Today, populations are overwhelmingly urban, the formal social structures (transportation, communications, health care, energy production and distribution, economic activities in general, and education and its spin-offs) are powerful, pervasive, important, and to a great extent essential. To compare in any uncritical way insights gained in Thoreau’s time to today’s needs, or to judge the experience from either time using the standards of the other, would be a poor way to handle things.
Harrison has drawn out valuable insights on the significance to the health of our societies of matters poetical, and provided enough indication that the poetical and the pragmatic are in a continuing struggle in a large grey area. If either is allowed to be eclipsed, we can expect trouble. “Forests” presents a comprehensive discussion of the role and importance of the poetical in our lives, using forests as an indicator of collective spiritual stance and of cultural well-being in general. This sort of discussion, in this mode of presentation, won’t appeal to everyone, but the basic message is too important to be missed.
Having read Harrison’s later book (“Gardens”) first, I looked forward to “Forests” and wasn’t disappointed. The two books are linked in some important ways. I came to the end of “Forests” informed, exhilarated, rejuvenated, and having a list of too many more works that I now feel compelled to read.
January 31, 2009
Why do we associate forests with magic, myths, transformations? This book is a meditation and a critical study of forests and man's relationship to them -- their natural form (botannical and animal), the property and ownership rights associated with them, and their role in literature and the human imagination -- from the early Greeks through the present day. Robert Pogue Harrison (the author) is a Stanford professor in the Italian studies department, but he is also a polyglot poetic spirit and philosopher, who reaches into shadows and pulls out light.
December 22, 2016
The first hundred pages are worth the price of admission, a truly fascinating examination of the ways that forests have figured in the Western imagination from the prehistorical to the medieval periods. As a Pacific Northwesterner who hikes a lot, I spend a lot of time in the woods, and some of Harrison’s work here is going to ring in my ears for years to come. Unfortunately, the remainder of the book struggles by comparison. It begins to feel more like an academic paper, the presentation slips out of unified focus and wanders. But those first hundred pages – fantastic.
March 3, 2019
A sophisticated and insightful look at the role of forests in human culture, literature, and imagination. Academic at times, and poetic at others, the sections I read were enlightening and thought-provoking.
January 12, 2020
Very white, male, Euro-centric history.
January 29, 2021
As a liberal arts major from the days when that mattered, I have always had a special place in my heart for broad, integrative theories that explore some theme across time, cultures, and artistic media. Research of this ilk borrows ideas from various disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and even cognitive sciences to critique diverse phenomena and arrive at encompassing truths that unify myriad bodies of knowledge. Though interpretive and selective, they are nonetheless audacious in their scope. And they tend to be written in gloriously florid academic prose.
Robert Pogue Harrison’s "Forests: The Shadow of Civilization" (1992) is one such work. (A caveat: In my opinion, attempting to rate a book like this from one to five stars is silly. Its intrinsic value is a function of how much it makes you think, not whether it is right or wrong, and especially not how much it entertains a person.)
Harrison aims to examine artistic expressions of humanity’s feelings toward sylvan wildernesses from classical antiquity to modern times. In doing so, he extracts material from eclectic, some might say random bodies of work, for those which he chooses to discuss inevitably represent a small fraction of the creative output in which forests are a subject. To his credit, Harrison does not limit himself to the products of elite culture, but also includes representations from folk traditions, as well as many lesser known artists and thinkers.
In general, Harrison portrays the changing perceptions of forests from ancient times, through the era when Christianity dominated Western thought, up to the Enlightenment and secularism as a progression through tragedy, comedy, and irony respectively. His use of those words is problematic, for they contain colloquial meanings that are far from his intended metaphor. Tragedy, in how the ancients’ viewed forests, manifested in a feeling like there was no purpose or meaning to wilderness. To Christians, though, the comedic outlook assured them that even those dark and forbidding places fit into God’s plans. Finally, as society adopted more secular attitudes, thinkers seeing themselves as detached from the natural world contrasted the ironies of human endeavor with the stable mysteries of the forests.
So, among the earliest sources he cites are Socrates, Virgil, Gilgamesh, and classical mythology. From the Christian era, he critiques Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, as well as an obscure jurist named John Manwood. Major Enlightenment thinkers are well represented—Descartes, Nietzsche, Kant, Rousseau, and others. Finally, the sections on modernity are far ranging in terms of artistic media and styles, from Whitman and Thoreau in the literary arts, to the Grimm Brothers, to the painter John Constable and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
In the end, Harrison despairs that the loss of forests in modern times corresponds to humanity’s lapsed ability to appreciate the complex aesthetics of wilderness. “It is this forest, wholly circumscribed by natural as well as cultural history, that the present age is ravaging.”
And how did this happen? In answer to that, Harrison marshals the kind of lofty rhetoric to which I alluded at the beginning of this review, and which I dearly love:
“…Life awakens to the fact there is something rather than nothing, that nature is without a human reason for being, and that we dwell in the givenness of loss. This self knowledge, this self knowledge alone, is freedom…
"But was it not precisely a poetic freedom of this sort that American promised those who willingly lost themselves across seas of departure?...
"Its fate, rather, was to sacrifice its freedom to nationhood, to reiterate and exasperate the rage for possession, and to fall into the watery mire of what is not life… Instead of a nation of poets, it became a nation of debtors, property owners, shopkeepers, spectators, gossipers, traffickers in rumor, prejudice, and information—capitalists who in their strange uncertainty about life pursue the delusions of recovery in their appropriation of everything.”
Amen to that.
Robert Pogue Harrison’s "Forests: The Shadow of Civilization" (1992) is one such work. (A caveat: In my opinion, attempting to rate a book like this from one to five stars is silly. Its intrinsic value is a function of how much it makes you think, not whether it is right or wrong, and especially not how much it entertains a person.)
Harrison aims to examine artistic expressions of humanity’s feelings toward sylvan wildernesses from classical antiquity to modern times. In doing so, he extracts material from eclectic, some might say random bodies of work, for those which he chooses to discuss inevitably represent a small fraction of the creative output in which forests are a subject. To his credit, Harrison does not limit himself to the products of elite culture, but also includes representations from folk traditions, as well as many lesser known artists and thinkers.
In general, Harrison portrays the changing perceptions of forests from ancient times, through the era when Christianity dominated Western thought, up to the Enlightenment and secularism as a progression through tragedy, comedy, and irony respectively. His use of those words is problematic, for they contain colloquial meanings that are far from his intended metaphor. Tragedy, in how the ancients’ viewed forests, manifested in a feeling like there was no purpose or meaning to wilderness. To Christians, though, the comedic outlook assured them that even those dark and forbidding places fit into God’s plans. Finally, as society adopted more secular attitudes, thinkers seeing themselves as detached from the natural world contrasted the ironies of human endeavor with the stable mysteries of the forests.
So, among the earliest sources he cites are Socrates, Virgil, Gilgamesh, and classical mythology. From the Christian era, he critiques Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, as well as an obscure jurist named John Manwood. Major Enlightenment thinkers are well represented—Descartes, Nietzsche, Kant, Rousseau, and others. Finally, the sections on modernity are far ranging in terms of artistic media and styles, from Whitman and Thoreau in the literary arts, to the Grimm Brothers, to the painter John Constable and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
In the end, Harrison despairs that the loss of forests in modern times corresponds to humanity’s lapsed ability to appreciate the complex aesthetics of wilderness. “It is this forest, wholly circumscribed by natural as well as cultural history, that the present age is ravaging.”
And how did this happen? In answer to that, Harrison marshals the kind of lofty rhetoric to which I alluded at the beginning of this review, and which I dearly love:
“…Life awakens to the fact there is something rather than nothing, that nature is without a human reason for being, and that we dwell in the givenness of loss. This self knowledge, this self knowledge alone, is freedom…
"But was it not precisely a poetic freedom of this sort that American promised those who willingly lost themselves across seas of departure?...
"Its fate, rather, was to sacrifice its freedom to nationhood, to reiterate and exasperate the rage for possession, and to fall into the watery mire of what is not life… Instead of a nation of poets, it became a nation of debtors, property owners, shopkeepers, spectators, gossipers, traffickers in rumor, prejudice, and information—capitalists who in their strange uncertainty about life pursue the delusions of recovery in their appropriation of everything.”
Amen to that.
April 15, 2024
This book invites readers to take a ‘walk in the woods’ in parts of the Western literary canon. The term “forests” serves as a coat rack on which our guide displays his (considerable) knowledge of classic texts and philology. He rehearses for us how forests appear as metaphors for states of being, enlightenment and confusion, or as sources of fable and philosophical analogies, or then again as settings for philosophizing, such as where Thoreau went to reflect on things. Often the text departs from forests entirely, the focus having widened to nature at large. Very occasionally, forests as living biotopes and objects of exploitation get a brief look-in. In our further wanderings in the author’s real, imagined and symbolic forests, we find ourselves reading excerpts by Dante, Vico and Descartes (whose views of forests the author dislikes), Fustel de Coulanges, Baudelaire (whose ‘forest of symbols’ gets approval), Samual Beckett (also praised) and many more.
The author’s method isn’t always clear. Associative leaps might describe some of it. A piece of architectural modernism by Frank Lloyd Wright gets an extensive discussion, evidently because it was built in a wooded area that came to mind in association with Thoreau’s woodland retreat. As we proceed, the literary significance of forests becomes yet more speculative, attenuated and arbitrary. Personal enthusiasms lead to hyperbolic statements, such as in the case of an obscure Italian poet, Andrea Zanzotto, whose work "may turn out to be one of the more significant historical events of our time". The author seems vaguely aware of this lack of coherence: “We have followed many circuitous paths since the beginning of this study”.
About really existing forests, the author is at wit’s end: “there is not much Germany can do about what they call Waldsterben, or the dying forest, for the death of the trees is caused by acid rain”. He further states: “The reasons for such devastation remain obscure…” Evidently, science-backed public policy (whose effectiveness, at least in curbing damage from acid rain, is undeniable) were for the author just too hard to figure out. That kind of ignorance didn’t scupper the book's utility for me as a collection of literary analects, but it did nothing to boost my confidence in the book's overall validity.
The author’s method isn’t always clear. Associative leaps might describe some of it. A piece of architectural modernism by Frank Lloyd Wright gets an extensive discussion, evidently because it was built in a wooded area that came to mind in association with Thoreau’s woodland retreat. As we proceed, the literary significance of forests becomes yet more speculative, attenuated and arbitrary. Personal enthusiasms lead to hyperbolic statements, such as in the case of an obscure Italian poet, Andrea Zanzotto, whose work "may turn out to be one of the more significant historical events of our time". The author seems vaguely aware of this lack of coherence: “We have followed many circuitous paths since the beginning of this study”.
About really existing forests, the author is at wit’s end: “there is not much Germany can do about what they call Waldsterben, or the dying forest, for the death of the trees is caused by acid rain”. He further states: “The reasons for such devastation remain obscure…” Evidently, science-backed public policy (whose effectiveness, at least in curbing damage from acid rain, is undeniable) were for the author just too hard to figure out. That kind of ignorance didn’t scupper the book's utility for me as a collection of literary analects, but it did nothing to boost my confidence in the book's overall validity.
July 10, 2021
There's some staggering and beautiful detail hidden in the undergrowth of this book, particularly in the earlier parts, and many new previously unknown texts it revealed, but a couple of things throw it off. Keeping in mind it's written in the early 90s, and that its stated mission is the place of forests in "western" thought, I can almost forgive its overwhelming whiteness and eurocentricity, thought it is a missed opportunity – I wanted to read the version of this book that _really_ wrestled with, or at least nodded to, how humanity as a whole considered the forest as shadow space. Even when it arrives in the Americas at the end, really there's only Thoreau and Frank Lloyd Wright. Secondly, was there not a single damn woman over all these millennia surveyed that had a thought worth noting about forests? Not a one? I can't forgive that for its time of writing. It also degenerates into its second half to a succession of middling lit crit essays about things (poems, paintings, buildings) with trees in them, which is not really what the promising core thesis was about. Alas.
November 23, 2022
dropping this from 5 to 4 stars solely because robert harrison seems to have forgotten that women exist? no joke, he doesn’t look at the work of even one single female author/scholar/artist/philosopher in this whole book. and beyond that, texts about women hardly even figure. there’s a section about inanna/the mother goddess and her connection to artemis, a section about the maenads, a section about the concept of women wearing makeup as discussed by baudelaire, and that’s pretty much it. harrison is at least honest about the extreme eurocentrism from the outset, given that the book was written in the 80’s and clearly laid out as an overview of “western civilization”, but the total elision of women from the progress of western literary and philosophical history is just inexcusable.
that being said, pretty much everything else about this book was phenomenal. I finished it about a week ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since then; I suspect I will pick it up many more times. plus the writing was lovely, and surprisingly funny at points.
that being said, pretty much everything else about this book was phenomenal. I finished it about a week ago and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since then; I suspect I will pick it up many more times. plus the writing was lovely, and surprisingly funny at points.
March 18, 2022
A classic of philosophic historicism. Pogue Harrison slices the genre even finer with his approach, that of telling history through the eyes of poets and their poetry. Great literature should help us understand the world better, and Forests succeeds on an (in)finitude of levels.
Forests is a highly readable but challenging read. RPH respects his readers, and never talks down or condescends. I highly recommend this for anyone seeking a close literary read that will help you understand your world and your place in it.
Forests is a highly readable but challenging read. RPH respects his readers, and never talks down or condescends. I highly recommend this for anyone seeking a close literary read that will help you understand your world and your place in it.
January 17, 2025
Went in flashes and sparks, stops and starts. I was completely enamored of the premise: exploring the dialectic between forests and civilization in Western metaphysics and all that that relationship indexes—in the realms of history, literature, poetry, public policy, etc. Forests of Nostalgia was the most revelatory, fresh, and concise chapter. Overall, this is a delectable resource for future reading.
April 1, 2018
A philosophical walk through the forests of Western thought, ranging from ancient to modern visions of forests in the mind of mankind.
February 3, 2019
dnf
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 24, 2019
Fascinating read, though "civilization" here mainly concerns men.
November 23, 2020
Some gems in here but a little too dense for me
Read
October 19, 2023Only read like 8 pages - only took like 3 hours… so I’m counting it!
November 29, 2025
Featured in the Yale Forestry Forum.
Forestry background.
Forestry background.
December 15, 2025
Meh… not a huge fan of this. It gave me some ideas for my Montaigne essay but it was reallyyyy dry. Also pagan :(
January 11, 2024
mostly found this hard to read and get through - but now and then there are some interesting points about forests and humans - like how in Europe it was kings who had to make laws about the forests to prevent everyone from just burning through and destroying them, but at the same time that assigned utilitarian value to the forests. It feels like a good number of people can't seem to want to save a forest just... because it's a forest, but only if it has some biological utility value or like makes living in a city easier by preserving rural environments
There is also literary, art and architectural analysis relating to forests but I found it harder to engage with.
There is also literary, art and architectural analysis relating to forests but I found it harder to engage with.
September 3, 2013
As anyone who's read my reviews will know, I very rarely give five stars to any book. Nothing is perfect, and this book is no exception. However, what makes this book the ultimate in my estimation is the fact that its ideas and sensibilities have resonated for me beyond the final pages and massively influenced my own thought and writing since I came across a segment of the book (about Gilgamesh) twenty years ago in Roger Gottlieb's expertly edited anthology for Routledge, THIS SACRED EARTH. Harrison's deeply sympathetic readings—which, I should add, constitute critical appreciation of the highest order—of the way the Western imagination has used and abused the notion of the forest from ancient times to the present are marvelously suggestive. What's more, he has read widely in non-Anglophone literature (his particular expertise is Italian poetry) and that allows him to range across the European and eventually the American continents. He shows how the forest has not only been a place of refuge but fear, of ownership and freedom from ownership, a place of madness and sanity, of kingship and commonweal, and where humankind has steadily denuded the wild of what is magical and mystical and replaced it with what is tame, material, and exploitable. The book is full of surprise readings and continuous echoes throughout the ages, as efforts are made to reclaim and conserve what is threatened from without by those who would destroy the ecology of the spirit and the human imagination as embedded within and represented by the forest. A wonderful, wonderful read.
September 12, 2012
A dense, thoroughly thought-through account that inclusively ponders myth, literature, law, and philosophy in order to discover why we, humans, are such damn bastards when it comes to relating to the world on-in which we live. We're all selfish jerkfaces and the problem is so endemic that we don't even know it exists. (I think the prevalence of critical media reviews about Mitt Romney is influencing my joy-taking in slinging casual 'disses'.) The great thing about this book is that Harrison doesn't only tell us how our thinking is wrong-headed; he doesn't just rail against the insensitivity of humanity, its prejudices, and its destructiveness (although he certainly does do that); but in addition to all that, he proposes ways to apprehend the world and our environment more consciously, and with a changed perspective, so as to exist alongside all the other living things on the planet. It's a keeper. I'll be looking for his two other books as well, about gardens, and where we bury our dead. The dude teaches at Stanford. Maybe, while I worked there, we passed in the library! Maybe we touched the same ancient books! NEAR-BRUSHES WITH HISTORY!
August 25, 2009
Two people whose intelligence I admire suggested I read this book and so, after dragging my feet for about a year, I searched it out, no doubt much to my family's chagrin because I've been quoting it for a month now. Pogue traces fear of the wild (forests) through the whole sweep of western letters from Gilgamesh to Frank Lloyd Wright. He finds his heroes in Wright, Constable, John Claire, Emerson. I'm not sure I followed him to his conclusions -- and it is probably irrelevant that no women feature in his discussion, though I did notice it -- but I really enjoyed the insights and notions he introduces on the way to those conclusions. I'll never be quite so complaisant about considering myself a humanist again.
November 1, 2013
This is one of two books that currently inspire my research. I keep it in my bag, by my bed, in my mind as I move forward into the second inspiring book that seems naturally suggested in the epilogue of Forests: "Every now and then the poet's word still bring logos (which Harrison translates as "gathering, binding" to language, yet we lose the ability toe reappropirate it. Why? Perhaps because such language does not "communicate" anything" (249). Onward into David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous.
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