Alaska 'The Problem of the Wilderness'

I went to Alaska for New Year; we spent a week travelling North from Anchorage by rail, 4x4 & light aircraft - I took along my A7SII for the trip.

The verse is from a book I found in our cabin (https://www.instagram.com/p/BO31pi9hiJp) that really resonated with the journey. Marshall was an environmental activist who wrote extensively about Alaska in the early 20th Century.

Vimeo Staff Pick

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The Problem of the Wilderness - Bob Marshall, 1930

It is well to reflect that the wilderness furnishes perhaps the best opportunity for pure esthetic enjoyment. This requires that beauty be observed as a unity, and that for the brief duration of any pure esthetic experience the cognition of the observed object must completely fill the spectator’s cosmos. There can be no extraneous thoughts—no question about the creator of the phenomenon, its structure, what it resembles or what vanity in the beholder it gratifies. “The purely esthetic observer has for the moment forgotten his own soul”, he has only one sensation left and that is exquisiteness. In the wilderness, with its entire freedom from the manifestations of human will, that perfect objectivity which is essential for pure esthetic rapture can probably be achieved more readily than among any other forms of beauty.