Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

When I left to live in the Mexican High Sierra eight years ago, I had room for only four books - ones I could not live without: "Forests" was one of them. Through my many years as a mythologist and therapist, I'd not found any work to equal this fascinating, spiritual exploration into the real and symbolic forest. A long time ago, a student in landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia gave me a copy, requesting my opinion of it. Her wise and sensitive professor had made it required reading for his graduate students, and how many would be astute enough to recognize its importance? Anyone with a true yearning to enter into the dark forest of myth and history, so beautifully explored by Joseph Campbell, will love Harrison's extraordinary revelations from the mythic past to the historical present, and emerge from the woods knowing that it's all part of the same mystery.

Harrison's book is exquisitely written, filled with both startling and subtle insights about how Westerners since the Greeks and Romans have imagined the nature and role of the wild places that lie always around the far edge of the cleared, cultivated, well-ordered places where civilized humans dwell. Harrison combines philosophy, history, and literature seamlessly. When you are finished reading this book, then read his later equally wonderful book: The Dominion of the Dead.

Although this is clearly a work in literary criticism, it is one that will appeal to those working in other areas. For instance, those working on Environmental Ethics will find a great deal of very information about how forests have been conceived in a great deal of the literature of the greater European world throughout history. Intellectual historians with an interest in how Europeans have conceived nature as a whole will find a great deal to interest them in this book that deals with forests in particular. But the primary audience is students of literature.The narrative of the book runs chronologically to the dawn of written history to Frank Lloyd Wright, though the vast majority of figures discusses are writers, and of those primarily writers of nonfictional literature. Harrison discusses an immense range of writers and works, from the EPIC OF GILGAMESH to Chaucer to Dante to Shakespeare to Descartes to Rousseau to Wordsworth to the Brothers Grimm to Thoreau. Although Harrison's prose style is not exhilarating, I never found the book to be less than interesting.Whether someone will find this interesting will depend on whether they want to know more about the way that forests have been conceived in European history. At various periods of time they have been view as scared, as dark places of fear, as resources for human exploitation, or as ecosystems valuable in their own right. Harrison does not touch upon all these aspects, but I don't think anyone interested in Western attitudes towards nature could help but find this book to be of the greatest help.

My old Cambridge tutor said that the only works of modern literary criticism he'd sell his shirt for were *Seven Types of Ambiguity* and *The Wheel of Fire*. For a long time I agreed. Then I read *Forests*. It is quite simply the most profound, the most moving, the best-written, the most important work of literary criticism of the late twentieth century.