“The landscape, like all objects big or small, contains an inner life that we come to appreciate only through knowing it. Yet acquiring this knowledge is an impossible task, made all the more vital because of its inherent impossibility. The only way we might come close to it is by going there, treading upon it and across it, diffusing ourselves in its spread. (We understand that we can never completely go inside it, become one with the soil and the fields and the horizon, at least not without severing ourselves permanently from the agency that animates us as living, perceiving beings.)”

My essay on James Benning has now been published online, at Randian.