Landscape - mountains, seas, moors, valleys - evokes markedly different responses in different people. Some find it all totally uninteresting: just so many tons of rock, gallons of cold salt water, acres of wild or domesticated vegetables. This is not an unreasonable response, since landscape clearly is just these things. The question is whether it's more than that, and a second group of people, perhaps more aesthetically alert, think it is. They find it (or at least, some of it) aesthetically delightful, full of beautiful shapes and colours, with strong and pleasing associations with childhood, or the land of their forefathers, or romantic stories about adventures in the wild. This response is also not unreasonable, since aesthetic features are worth responding to, and such associations are indeed present, as literature and history constantly show us. But there's also a third group of people, whose response to landscape is rather different, and really much stranger. For this group, landscape is much more than a source of pleasing aesthetic or nostalgic experiences; it's a haunting passion (as one of its most famous, and longwinded, representatives noted); it's something which shapes a whole life. For these people, every natural scene, every fall of land or changing colour of the sea, speaks its own unique, intense, significant word - as they keep telling us, at frankly tedious length. The word in question seems always to be in a foreign language whose translation manual we've permanently mislaid, but nonetheless it seems to be experienced by its devotees as being utterly, overwhelmingly, filled with meaning and beauty, of a kind which induces an intense and nameless longing for who knows what. Now really this response isn't reasonable at all, especially not for people of a sceptical, rationalist, materialist cast of mind (as I am myself). How can the impersonal physical world possibly breathe forth meaning, in the way in which these fruitcakes insist it does? There's no decent secular sense to be made of this at all, as far as I can see. The best we can do is look for some plausible sociobiological explanation, in terms of adaptive value, of how this response might have arisen.
However in spite of my believing all the above to be true, and to my considerable chagrin, I find myself irrevocably part of this third group of people, the ones who bore on about the transient sunlight on the shoulder of the hill, the beauty of the cold upland plateau, the remote loveliness of the island on the horizon. Like the rest of this bunch of junkies, I'm helplessly moved by, and addicted to, such scenes. And I can't for the life of me see why. What on earth is going on here? Why does it all seem so significant? Not that I'd want it any different, of course. Who would willingly give up the ability to see how wonderful the moonlight is on the far northern waters of the Atlantic, how breathtaking the severe austerity of the high desolate moors, and so on and on and on and on... (Eve Garrard)