"Kindred Spirits" and the Representation of Nature

I've been kicking these ideas around for a few weeks now, so I figured I'd finally commit them to paper (or something like that!) We briefly discussed Asher Durand's painting "Kindred Spirits" (1849) in class several weeks ago in relation to Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. I love this painting... the mountain vistas, the two figures gently shaded by an overhanging branch, the darkness in the painting's foreground broken up by the white waters of the river. Bryson too mentions this painting about half-way through his literary trek along the Appalachian Trail, observing the regular reproduction of this image in books concerning the American landscape of the nineteenth century. I remember seeing "Kindred Spirits" on the cover of my Early American literature anthology in undergrad, and thinking how glorious it must be to hike the Trail!  Of course, Bryson de-romanticizes our notions of this kind of walk in America's woods, observing that "nothing like that view exists now, of course. Perhaps it never did. Who knows how much license these romantic johnnies took with their stabbing paintbrushes?" (117)

Depicted in the portrait are Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School movement in American art, and American poet William Cullen Bryant (anyone read "Thanatopsis"?) These kindred spirits-- the poet and the painter-- meeting at an idealized spot in the Catskills mountains, raises (for me) questions about the representation of nature. In this class (and in general), we look to artists to "capture" nature for us, whether it be in verse, in non-fiction reminiscences, or on canvas. Bryson himself questions the realism of this painting, and even a quick online search tells us that the work combines several different landscapes and was composed many years after Cole's initial hike into the woods. This leads me to think about how we-- painters, poets, writers, students alike-- represent nature. Do we strive for realism? Is it necessary or even possible to recreate what is "real"?

Reading through Bryson's account of hiking the AT, we know that parts of this must stray from his actual experience... his later incorporation of environmental research, his portraits of small towns such as Centralia, even his accounts of specific thoughts and moments must be synthesized, edited, and polished in order to produce a satisfying piece of writing that holds together as a book, and that holds together chapter by chapter (and that makes us laugh at every other page!) How much realism is lost in this process? How much can we expect Bryson (or any of ourselves, for that matter) to be able to reproduce an "objective" version of reality?

Even in our preservation of nature, do we lose a sense of what is REAL? Bryson observes that "in America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition-- either you ruthlessly subjugate it [...] or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit" (200). By deifying nature in places like the Appalachian Trail-- by trying to remove traces of human activity-- don't we also misrepresent what "nature" is?

In the end, of course, I'm no closer to an answer than I was at the beginning. But I think that as long as we are aware of how we tend to represent things-- in image, in verse, in fiction, in memories-- we can see through those representations to find what is real.