Wuthering Immensity
John R. Stilgoe
Andrew J. Russell, Hanging Rock, foot of Echo Canon, c .1868
Spatial immensity beggars designation. Immensity itself fails, vastness and other common terms fail, yet strangers discovering immensity persist in using vocabulary educated observers once applied to subjects other than lots and lots of land or sea, structures and concatenations of structures disturbingly large, perhaps searing in size or massing, and even vehicles an order or two of magnitude larger than any hitherto encountered. Five hundred years into the settlement of North America by Europeans and Africans, intellectuals, and designers especially, lack words for bigger than big. An unwholesome, stubborn refusal to confront the immensities of the continent, indeed the immensity of the continent itself, now hobbles conception and design in global era. Scale, as designers glibly use the word, demands redefinition. But the wuthering giant frightens them back to urban and other small scales.
“Five hundred years into the settlement of North America by Europeans and Africans, intellectuals, and designers especially, lack words for bigger than big.”
American children’s books maintain the grasp of the European, especially the British, concept of immensity. Written over decades according to a near-seamless but unstated code, the genre presents immensity of landscape as a three-part concept: emptiness, openness, and the monotonous, uninterrupted surface. While long established in British landscape writing, the concept of immensity designates landscapes that intellectuals, especially landscape painters, dismiss as vacuous and uninviting, and places unworthy of any attention, especially sustained scrutiny. These landscapes are presented as places to avoid because they exhaust or enervate strangers.
“Most people who have merely passed through it have very little to say in its favour,” wrote Julian Tennyson of Suffolk in 1939. “The reason for this is simple: you can’t judge Suffolk from a motor-car because the main roads happen to have the dullest landscape in the county,” especially “that extraordinary piece of country called Breckland, which at first sight seems nothing more than a dozen miles of dreary heath.” The region perplexed Tennyson, a native of coastal Suffolk and a champion of its parts Constable painted. “The most extraordinary stretch of country in Suffolk, perhaps in all England,” and the part over the Norfolk border, the four hundred square miles of Breckland, is not heath as he first calls it, but “sandy soil, quite bare of anything but stones, sorrel, ragwort, bugloss and thin, brownish grass,” useless as arable or grazing land, bereft of trees, and defying any attempt to find it somehow tolerable, let alone beautiful. He wondered how anyone could live in Breckland, and imagined that “he must be of a very unusual character, a character independent of the external influences essential to most of us.” He knew he himself could not live in such an immensity of sky and scruffiness. He loved heaths “in moderation” and gorse and bracken, and he was “not averse to a few miles of breck—provided I know that there is something within reach beyond it.” Unlike so many landscape analysts, he confronted the psychological states the region engendered. “But to live in the heart of Breckland would be for me as if I were cast adrift in the middle of the sea, with the nearest land a thousand miles away. Leagues and leagues and leagues of it around me—I believe I should go raving mad. It is not a feeling of being shut in or suffocated: it is precisely the opposite.” In the end, the immensity of the place appalls. “You feel that you are loose in some vast, flat, limitless arena, that all about you, beyond your sight, there is something which you most desperately want, and that if you run all your life and in any direction you will never reach it.”[i] In all European landscape writing there exists no more courageous grappling with the psychological impact of a place outside the aesthetic frameworks educated people accept as givens, a place that threatens not only landscape aesthetics, but stability of mind.
Children’s books help create and maintain these frameworks. Still widely read by up-scale American girls, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) relocates an eight-year-old English girl from India to a manor house isolated in the Yorkshire moors. “Out of a deep window she could see a great climbing stretch of land which seemed to have no trees on it, and to look rather like an endless, dull, purplish sea,” but Mary Lennox rarely approaches it and instead explores the formal grounds, especially the gardens walled against the wind. The wind continually “wuthers” about the house, and she learns that the term “must mean that hollow shuddering sort of roar which rushed round and round the house as if the giant no one could see were buffeting it and beating at the walls and windows trying to break in.” She discovers an abandoned walled garden, begins restoring it secretly, and in the process improves her character, defining it against the wuthering immensity just beyond the formal grounds. A sort of bildungsroman grounded on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Burnett’s novel emphasizes Mary’s need for enclosure and beauty as defense against the giant. “But one knew he could not get in, and somehow it made one feel very safe and warm inside a room with a red coal fire,” Burnett concludes of Mary’s awareness of wind-swept immensity.[ii] The room is secure, the garden walled and locked, and all within becomes orderly, beautiful, safe, and knowable, castled against the moor and the wuthering wind; against immensity.
Didacticism starts early. Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius (1982) teaches little girls (and the teenage babysitters who read the sumptuously illustrated book aloud to them) to make the world beautiful.[iii] Miss Rumphius plants lupines everywhere around her quaint house in a quaint village in a quaint coastal landscape, but nearly every page features a view of the ocean, something Miss Rumphius cannot beautify; something not quaint. Cooney juxtaposes the immensity of the sea, rendered usually as a slate-gray wash, against the enclosed, diminutive structures and spaces amenable to further beautification. Adjacent but beyond exists the sea, the out there, as in “out to sea.”
Post-modern theory grapples poorly with such feminist-era didacticism. As early as 1958, Gaston Bachelard explored the “dialectics of center and horizon,” noting the disparate ways plains, plateaus, and deserts affect individuals. The Poetics of Space emphasizes landscape and built interiors but essentially ignores the sea. In condemning Hippolyte Taine’s artificial disillusionment with his first view of the ocean (“‘I seemed to see one of those long stretches of beet-fields that one sees in the country near Paris, intersected by patches of green cabbage, and strips of russet barley.’”) but saying little more than “it is hard to believe that in the presence of the sea, anyone could be so obsessed by beet fields,” Bachelard nonetheless momentarily confronted his hunch that modern urbanity might fail to embrace the sea as one measure of immensity; might indeed shy from the sea itself while enjoying a week or two of sand-and-sun holiday.[iv] [D1]
Tennyson grew up alongshore. “Something in its wildness attracted me, something in its combination of heath and marsh and sea stirred me with the grand majesty of loneliness,” he wrote of his unfettered boyhood among commercial fishermen and water fowlers. “I felt that all things mysterious and exciting were within my grasp around this abandoned shore. And so I explored it by day and by night, and came to know it in all the amazing changes of weather and of season.”[v] But his intimacy with the sea failed to shape his understanding of the brecklands no more than Hodgson’s protagonist sees the moor through the prism of her passage from India. In her book aimed at children, especially girls younger than ten or eleven, Clooney presents the fundamental conceptual issue now so important in understanding American space: the coastal elite has forgotten the sea that makes it coastal. It forgets the majesty of immensity.
Mariners speak precisely of sea states, sometimes using scend and other terms indicating wave motion originating far beyond the horizon, skies, and wind, but only landsmen unused to ocean voyaging routinely write inchoate paragraphs about seemingly undifferentiated emptiness. The collapse of ocean-liner travel circa 1960 fundamentally changed modern attitudes about marine immensity and its permutations. Liners kept schedules in all but the worst weather. Rising gales prompted passengers to hide in cabins, wretched with seasickness. Only a few pondered davit-slung lifeboats, how the seas must seem to fishermen and others in small craft, and the distance of rescue. The sailing-ship viewpoint long underlay the European and African colonization of North America and especially of the prairies in wagons nicknamed prairie schooners. Almost nothing remains of it now, when bulky cruise ships (never called liners) scurry away from any sort of rough weather. But aboard liners passengers learned to stretch out an arm, clench a fist, and know that the three valleys between the knuckles roughly measure nine degrees of arc, that the fist with thumb extended sideways measures about fifteen, that an island mountain a mile high can be seen from almost two hundred miles away by a sharp-eyed top-deck passenger.[vi] Such skills, learned during quiet days at sea when passengers relaxed while gazing at immensity, extended to the piers of New York and other coastal cities: the great liners were, intermittently, part of urban form and their skills came ashore. Cruise-ship passengers, determined to be entertained constantly, tend to focus on in-hull amusements: skilled perception of ocean immensity is as alien to them as the ocean in most coastal cities. Harbor-front parks abut harbors, not the sea, and few city dwellers explore the outer reaches of their own harbors, avoiding so-called “working waterfronts” altogether.
Thus when Robert D. Kaplan writes that “a good place to understand the present, and to ask questions about the future, is on the ground, traveling as slowly as possible,” he angles reader attention to ground, not ocean, and indirectly focuses it on walkable space. His Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (2012) emphasizes that almost all ground was walkable once since everyone walked, but that post-war transportation, especially jetliner travel, fractured older ways of knowing and coarsened understanding of the immensities between major world airports. Another of his books, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, focuses on an ocean and its littoral, emphasizing the enduring existing of dhows and other traditional slow-moving sailing vessels now essentially invisible to intelligence agencies. More than most contemporary strategists, Kaplan champions slow, traditional travel through immensity: he emphasizes the desperate need for intimacy with the giant.
“In the foreground there was nothing, in the middle distance, nothing; in the distance, nothing—nothing, nothing, nothing, met the eye in all that treeless waste of brown and gray which lay between the railroad line and the horizon”
American coastal elites familiar with ocean-liner travel shaped present attitudes toward continental immensity first explored by settlers moving west on foot or horseback or in wagons. In 1914, for example, Julian Street described waking in a stopped Pullman sleeper somewhere west of Kansas City, hearing “the steady monotonous whistling of the wind” in its ventilators. His awakening rewards sustained scrutiny. “How many things there are in life which we think we know from hearsay, yet which, when we actually encounter them, burst upon us with a new and strange significance,” he asks before admitting that hitherto he had believed he had “realized the vastness of the United States without having actually traveled across the country.” His awakening came despite his familiarity with steamship travel. “I had imagined that I understood the prairies without having laid eyes upon them, but when I raised my window shade that morning, and found the prairies stretching out before me, I was as surprised, as stunned, as though I had never heard of them before, and the idea came to me like an original thought: how perfectly enormous they are! And how like the sea!” Street lay in bed “gazing out at the appalling spread of land and sky. Even at sea the great bowl of the sky had never looked so vast to me. The land was nothing to it. In the foreground there was nothing, in the middle distance, nothing; in the distance, nothing—nothing, nothing, nothing, met the eye in all that treeless waste of brown and gray which lay between the railroad line and the horizon, on which was discernible the faint outlines of several ships—ships which were in reality a house, a windmill and a barn.” Later in the day Street turned his attention inward, to his fellow passengers gazing at terrestrial immensity interrupted only by tiny hamlets. “I saw a man across the aisle look out of the window, scowl, rise from his seat, throw up his arms, and exclaim, addressing no one in particular: ‘God! How can they stand living out here? I’d rather be dead!’ My companion and I had been speaking of the same thing, wondering how people could endure their lives in such a place.”[vii] A journalist and travel writer, Street had hitherto focused his efforts on Europe, publishing a book on Paris and turning to the United States only when World War I curtailed American overseas travel. His awakening parallels Tennyson’s in the Brecklands with one significant difference: Tennyson imagined walking, even running out of breckland immensity. Street understood a different order of immensity, one that seemed to defy even the transcontinental train.
Street traveled by a long-distance train carrying first-class cars, Pullman sleepers, a dining car, and observation car with open-air platform, but it carried coaches too and stopped at many tiny stations express trains flashed past. It moved relatively slowly and stopped often to make way for faster trains. His awakening fits into the larger literature of train travel, of course, and particularly the class divide between the wealthy in first-class cars and the hamlet and farm people beyond the plate-glass windows. But it also indicates something about the discovery of sea-like immensity that unnerves and puzzles, as it appalls the passenger who exclaims that he cannot understand how its residents stand it. Many east-coast adults traveling to the west coast for the first time had no intellectual framework into which such immensity might be fitted: they murmured that Kansas or North Dakota or Montana “went on forever” and buried themselves in books and magazines, enduring the journey.
“Long before airline passengers coined the phrase “fly-over land,” most train passengers had learned to look inward, to play games and to read, rather than look outward at an immensity that seemed to defy pedestrian effort despite the obvious presence of adults and children who lived in it.”
By 1935 elites taught their children at least something about what lay beyond the plate-glass windows. Arts Stories, a multi-volume series aimed at children under the age of ten, deals explicitly with the play of light, shadow, and color as seen from first-class cars equipped with large windows and seats that sometimes faced outward, not ahead.[viii] While intended as the foundation for subsequent instruction in art and the widest possible range of design, such books aimed too at sharpening children’s interest in children’s-book illustrations. Nowadays forgotten, the non-fiction genre presumes wealthy readers: in the Depression few such young readers lived away from a handful of coastal states, but at least some parents and educators understood the knowing of immensity as fundamental to the understanding of American national identity and as necessary to personal power. Little exists about the reaction of young children to immensity in any era, and the near-absence of evidence from the period between about 1900 and 1950 proves particularly vexing given the growing power of cinema, but at least some parents tried to shape their children’s understanding of it. Long before airline passengers coined the phrase “fly-over land,” most train passengers had learned to look inward, to play games and to read, rather than look outward at an immensity that seemed to defy pedestrian effort despite the obvious presence of adults and children who lived in it. But some did look and perforce wondered at the people who inhabited immensity itself and at the force of immensity in national character and culture.
Human occupation unnerved Tennyson, Street, and other thoughtful strangers to immensity. Occupation distinguishes, fundamentally, landsmen encounter with ocean immensity from immensity of land: no one lives on the sea.[ix] People who live in immensity perplex thoughtful observers from coastal places, but until about 1960 the people struck observers as poor, backward, somehow deprived of stimuli (especially cultural), and thus unimportant in larger conceptual frameworks. Urban elites coveted nothing such people had: the scruffy farms of northern New England eventually attracted the wealthy seeking summer homes, but no one wanted a few acres of breckland or eastern Colorado or central Nebraska. But after about 1965 a vicious disjunction shattered the complacency of coastal intellectuals driving across the country.
Airline passengers easily dismissed the unseen immensity below as the habitat of hicks Hollywood lampooned in “Green Acres” and similar shows. Many motorists driving on the national-parks vacations first popularized by the railroad industry’s “See America First” advertising and subsequently by the automobile industry (“See the USA in Your Chevrolet”) and then on the way to and from Disneyland understood immensity as something to get through as fast as possible without getting speeding tickets. But astute motorists using the new Interstate Highway System discovered farm-family wealth and high-tech agriculture: they realized too the near limitless growth latent in farming. After the 1973 gasoline crisis, much cross-country driving stopped, and financial stringency (which may have impacted straitened intellectuals especially) prompted coastal elites to fly. Even well-to-do families fly, often because parents can spare only limited time from employment responsibility: astonishingly few children routinely enjoy transcontinental drives. Immensity, its details (the ownership of small private aircraft west across the High Plains or the physical constraints on rural school-bus routes for example), and its significance all appear less familiar than in the passenger-train era.
Since 1977 I have taught courses on the national landscape. Over the decades the proportion of undergraduate students who have traveled by land at least once across the continent has dropped from about 95 percent to about 5 percent (those who have traveled by sea make up less than 1 percent). In the late 1990s some first told me privately what is now a chorus: that their parents did them a disservice by vacationing in Europe and places they call exotic, especially warm, wild places, reached by airliners and small aircraft. The shift represents an intractable pedagogical problem, because the students familiar with the immensity of North America are almost all what I must call here “old-money,” born into families with a deep understanding of American immensity as capital as much as a physical and cultural whole and with a tradition of educating their children in immensity. Such students embrace my lectures on the aesthetics of prairie as presented in National Grasslands sites or the lack of private-pilot licenses among coastal twenty-somethings or the physical limits of rural grocery delivery; most others struggle to comprehend the area of western-state counties or the tillage issues involved in thousand-acre wheat fields. They struggle to frame questions, using (and misusing) “scale” and other terms, and grow irritated by their lack of spatial skills and firsthand knowledge, sometimes irritated enough to ask why they should study places “where almost no one lives.” Immensity befuddles and even threatens them as it did Julian Tennyson; it wuthers at the edges of their fragile urban and suburban certainties.
Knowing immensity intimately means glimpsing the subtle ways it shapes national and global forces and its potential to transform such. That all but the oldest of American elites raises even its youngest children to ignore or belittle immensity augurs ill for a nation defined by immensity itself.
[i] Suffolk Scene: A Book of Description and Adventure (London: Blackie, 1939), pp. 2, 67-69.
[ii] New York: Lippincott, 1911), pp. 26, 45, 68.
[iii] (New York: Viking, 1982): almost all of my women students in the past ten years know this book.
[iv] (Boston: Beacon, 1994), pp. 196-197, 204-206.
[v] Suffolk Scene, p. 183.
[vi] Leonard Eyges, The Practical Pilot (Camden, Maine: International Marine, 1989), pp. 92-94 and
[vii] (New York: Century, 1914), pp. 365-366, 371, 375.
[viii] William G. Whitford et al, Art Stories: Book Two (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1935), esp. pp. 87-89.
[ix] LeGuin.
[D1]Sentence is lacking something, doesn’t it?