Landscapes of the Mind

A landscape is a visual perception, the way in which we experience our environment through our eyes. In this provocative book Douglas Porteous ventures far beyond the visual into the myriad other sensory and existential perceptions -- otherscapes -- through which we encounter the worlds around and within us. Part I, Sensuous Worlds, investigates and celebrates the problems and joys of Smellscape and Soundscape. These interpretations accumulate in the pivotal essay on Bodyscape. Part II, Landscapes of Metaphor, delves more deeply into the existential landscape antinomies of human life: body (Bodyscape), vs mind (Inscape); home (Homescape) vs. travel (Escape); and, mirroring the sequence of urbanization, rural childhood (Childscape) vs. urban Adulthood (Deathscape). Rarely considered as an interconnected sequence, these 'scape studies serve to illuminate, interpret, and critique the human condition in that we are pleased to call Western 'civilization.' Porteous draws from a remarkably wide array of sources -- the modern novel (particularly the works of Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry), poetry, travel literature, geography, psychology, urban design, and environmental aesthetics -- and adds specially commissioned line-drawings by Ole Heggen. The result is an extraordinary work, interdisciplinary in scope, non-technical in language, written with authority and passion.