THE DISAPPEARING LANDSCAPE OF NAMES em – 6/2
Once there was not an inch of the landscape that was not named, not a star in the sky, not a bird or a beast. But increasingly name is being replaced by number. Even children on entry into school are given a ‘unique personal number’. Divorced from the countryside we are forgetting – or never knowing – the common names of flowers, birds, trees and mushrooms. Without names we are left with a blur, a white noise, nature-as-wallpaper. When we know the names, we care; when we don’t know the names, we disconnect: the names disappear, and so do the things.
Linda Proud is the author of many books including the critically acclaimed ‘Botticelli Trilogy’, a sequence of novels set in Renaissance Florence. Her most recent publication is another novel set in the fifteenth century, A Gift for the Magus.