Wilderness
Wild Alaska, where the weather is untamable. And exactly because of it, you can enjoy exuberant, exquisite views.
THE PROBLEM OF THE WILDERNESS
Video inspired by the thoughts of Bob Marshal
WHO WAS ROBERT "BOB" MARSHALL
Bob Marshall (January 2, 1901 – November 11, 1939) was an American forester, writer, and wilderness activist. The son of Florence and Louis Marshall, a wealthy constitutional lawyer and conservationist, Bob Marshall developed a love for the outdoors as a young child. An avid hiker and climber, he visited the Adirondack Mountains frequently during his youth, ultimately becoming one of the first Adirondack Forty-Sixers.
He also traveled to the Brooks Range of the Alaskan wilderness. He wrote numerous articles and books about his travels, including the bestselling 1933 book Arctic Village.
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.