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Preservation
What do we keep and why do we keep it? If something is worth keeping, how do we go about preserving it? These are the questions Peter Svenson addresses in Preservation, a moving and eloquent meditation on the idea of preservation, public and private, natural and historical.
Svenson, an abstract artist and the author of the critically acclaimed Farming a Civil War Battleground, lives on and farms a field that was the site of a Civil War battle in Virginia. He begins Preservation with the impulse to preserve the battlefield and other Civil War monuments, questioning what is being memorialized both physically and morally, and pointing out that how we choose to memorialize something is as important as what we choose to remember about it.
He then moves to the idea of saving the farmland surrounding his own - land that, without intervention, will probably be sold for development within the next generation. He describes his struggles to maintain his fields without the use of chemicals and to painstakingly refurbish old farm implements. At the same time, he brings the ambivalence of his neighbors toward the historical and financial demands of their property into sharp focus.
Interspersed throughout is a memoir of Svenson's New England boyhood in which he evokes and thereby preserves his best self at a variety of ages and contemplates how these selves are incorporated into - or missing from - the middle-aged man he is today.
Graceful, impassioned, and personal, Preservation is a call to all of us to appreciate what needs to be preserved in the world and in the self.
Svenson, an abstract artist and the author of the critically acclaimed Farming a Civil War Battleground, lives on and farms a field that was the site of a Civil War battle in Virginia. He begins Preservation with the impulse to preserve the battlefield and other Civil War monuments, questioning what is being memorialized both physically and morally, and pointing out that how we choose to memorialize something is as important as what we choose to remember about it.
He then moves to the idea of saving the farmland surrounding his own - land that, without intervention, will probably be sold for development within the next generation. He describes his struggles to maintain his fields without the use of chemicals and to painstakingly refurbish old farm implements. At the same time, he brings the ambivalence of his neighbors toward the historical and financial demands of their property into sharp focus.
Interspersed throughout is a memoir of Svenson's New England boyhood in which he evokes and thereby preserves his best self at a variety of ages and contemplates how these selves are incorporated into - or missing from - the middle-aged man he is today.
Graceful, impassioned, and personal, Preservation is a call to all of us to appreciate what needs to be preserved in the world and in the self.
190 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1994
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About the author
Peter Svenson
19 books3 followersPeter Svenson was born in 1944. He has a B.A. from Tufts University and an M.F.A. in painting from the University of North Carolina. He lives Cross Keys, Virginia.
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May 25, 2022
In "Preservation", Peter Svenson more-or-less alternates biographical chapters with current stories of his farm in Virginia, site of a not very famous Civil War battle. The stories of his growing up are engaging, though told in overwrought prose most of the time. The most interesting parts (to me) tell of his experiences as a hay farmer: from using small equipment cutting the hay that just happens to be growing there when he bought the place, he slowly purchases larger tools, often in poor condition, refurbishes them and makes his hay operation more efficient, culminating in plowing half his acreage under and starting over with a new, more desirable forage crop. It's a nice little book, not his best work, but worth reading.
Displaying 1 of 1 review