Open Spaces

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature more…”

So waxed Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold” about what surely has been the unspoken sentiment of many. Defined by motion and unforgiving of sloth, the demands of modernity offer but few opportunities to stop and catch one’s breath. It comes to no surprise then that we often use our brief moments of respite to mentally teleport to a fantastical world, where all is forgiven and life is a lot more simple and serene.

For those more burdened than others by the drudgery of daily life, this escapist itch is predictably stronger. Even so, there certainly lies in all of us to some degree, a tiny Mephistophelian voice that, rather than tempt with material pleasures, goads us to gleefully abandon the present.

To put it another way: How many of you have ever had the desire, however fleeting, to drop everything and take a two-week sojourn to St. Lucia?

As escaping to the Caribbean is rarely a viable course of action — at least for those of us who wish to maintain our obligations, livelihoods, and grade point averages — we naturally drift to less ambitious ways to abscond from the diktats of reality. For instance, we watch movies and television sitcoms, melding ourselves into the characters onscreen who seemingly never have to pay rent or file a W-4. Whether it’s Ross Geller or Superman, these are figures whose desires and destinies are more limited by the screenwriter’s pen than traffic or bounced checks.

Of course, we do not only find escape in following the lives of fictional others. After all, the conversations we have every day, from Sunday brunch gossip to water cooler talk and barista banter, represent some of the most potent social glues holding communities together in America. And if social interaction is ever insufficient in helping us withstand the monotony of the workweek, we can always briefly go full Byron: venturing literally into the “pathless woods” to seek Nature herself.

The various methods that humans have crafted to seek a temporary reprieve from everyday life are well-represented in artistic traditions around the world, and examples of renditions abound among Harvard’s collections. One can point to the dreamy procession of boats that Claude Monet drew at Argenteuil, conveniently leaving out the smokestacks of factories that surrounded the town in order to capture what could be real than what really was. In rougher yet similarly broad brushstrokes, John Singer Sargent’s depiction of Lake O’Hara in the Canadian Rockies balances the calmness of the water with the terrific majesty of the terrain behind it, almost as if to warn the eager adventurer, still accustomed to urban comforts, that nature is an equally loving and cruel mistress.

Lest we artificially confine ourselves to the Western canon, there are a plethora of works originating from East Asia that convey the same themes, such as Yi Jeong’s 17th century portrayal of a wizened figure seeking solace beside a lake. In fact, the entire landscape painting tradition in Tang-era China became an outlet for artists to find meaning in the natural world as political instability around them made reality devoid of it.

The longing to escape what “is” constitutes an all but natural aspect of the human condition. While the hustle and bustle of modernity may make this desire more evident, and fulfilling it more arduous, we have sought to rid ourselves of the present since the distant past. But, whether for our collective sanity or the sake of good art, that’s no reason not to keep trying.

Alexander Junxiang Chen ’24 is a Neuroscience and Chemistry concentrator in Quincy House. His column “Artifactual” appears on Thursdays.