The world is huge, too big to get, but when you look at a landscape painting, it pares it down, it makes a window you can look through to see only enough and remember or think about somewhere else, another way to be.
When you look at a landscape painting, you think you could understand part of the world for a little time. We need those “spots” of time, as Wordsworth called them, moments that happen inside or to you, or things or ways you see when the world, which Wordsworth called “unintelligible,” suddenly becomes not only intelligible but kind. Kind as in good and nice, but also as in kin, like kith, related to you, because you are part of the world; you need reminding of this. We need reminding a lot these days—because of the disemboweling of the Environmental Protection Agency and global warming and rising oceans and snowstorms in places there shouldn’t be and islands of plastic garbage and Katrina. Also, the Dakota Access Pipeline.