"The dichotomy between the visual and the cultural reflects the  long debate between form and content in art, design, and planning, the ongoing quarrel between the aesthetic and the social." . Robert Riley, in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes by Paul Groth and Todd Bressi, p. 201

The physical landscape constitutes one of the best available links to the past. Indeed, we should think of landscape as a document, like a book or an oration or a code of laws. When properly 'read,' the landscape establishes a dramatic sense of continuity with the past.  The historical value of any object or landscape, however, depends in large part on intellectual interpretation of often confusing visual clues. In the natural landscape this is compounded by ambiguous and contradictory assumptions about nature."  Roderick Nash

"Historic landscapes are harder to protect than buildings partly because few view 'natural' features as historical.,"31 A concern for historic value in the natural landscape often suffers  from an inherent ambiguity. Indeed, the two terms are often thought to be antithetical, and some of the deepest appreciation for natural landscapes derives, as in the statement of Thoreau about Walden Pond cited earlier, from a sense of their timelessness and constant rebirth." David Lowenthal

Scenic, beautiful, vast, intimate, azure, rugged, ocean of green --- these are but a few of the aesthetic evaluations of the landscape associated with the Blue Ridge Parkway. Aesthetics runs like a sub-text through all aspects of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Some argue that aesthetics is politics. Some say it is a cultural response.  Others contend that aesthetics is grounded in the ordering of line, form, space, color, texture, and pattern.  Does "significant form" define an aesthetic experience? Is the Blue Ridge Parkway a work of art?  Or, is it an instrumentalist vision?

Aesthetics means many things to many people.  Is the aesthetic a visible and sensory and mental information set?  For example, Wilbur Zelinsky said that minorities left no cultural landscape, no aesthetic trace.  What he measured was the ownership of the cultural landscape.  Most of the interactions that took place between minorities and the cultural landscape generally took place in landscapes that were owned by others. This is a narrow perspective, that does not fully allow for the visual response to the landscape itself.  This visual interaction produces a sense of pleasure from the simple act of viewing a pleasurable landscape.  Visual interactions may be dependent on the personal response to the characteristics of the visual --- line, form, shape, color, texture, etc.  The common visual interactions along the Parkway are generally the "glimpse and go" visual of the landscape seen within the boundary of the windshield of a car.  This limited aesthetic is the most common aesthetic experience found along the Parkway, unless one leaves the car and steps onto the many "balconies' along the Parkway.  

The idea of the rare experience that recalls the history of long-past time -- the time of log cabins, self-sufficiency, the yoke and the plow, help us to evoke the memory of origins.  The idea that the current landscape always existed in the form seen along the Parkway, is a romantic notion.  A more interesting, and more creative aesthetic process is that which is vicarious.  The vicarious aesthetic uses the raw materials at hand to create internalized fantasies or narrative fantasies that grow from an interaction with either a viewed landscape, or one that evokes a romantic or fantastical response.  One such vicarious aesthetic is that found in the writing of the early science fiction of Jules Verne. 

Sometimes the nostalgic and romantic can be pure fantasy as it was for author Jules Verne when he described a fantasy world deep within the mountains of the Linville Gorge area, an area just off the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Even though there is no record that Jules Vern ever visited the Linville Gorge area, his novel, Master of the Universe, is set in this area and the geography is reinvented to match the fantastical worlds seen in other Verne novels. In Master of the World (1911, Eng. translation), the author's last novel, he describes strange occurrences deep inside the mountains that were apparently based on newspaper and magazine accounts of volcanic activity thought to be at work in Bald Mountain, close to Linville Gorge. Verne describes the events:

MASTER OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER 1 - What Happened in the Mountains

"... The strange occurrences began in the western part of our great American State of North Carolina. There, deep amid the Blueridge [sic] Mountains rises the crest called the Great Eyrie. Its huge rounded form is distinctly seen from the little town of Morganton on the Catawba River, and still more clearly as one approaches the mountains by way of the village of Pleasant Garden.

Why the name of Great Eyrie was originally given this mountain by the people of the surrounding region, I am not quite sure. It rises rocky and grim and inaccessible, and under certain atmospheric conditions has a peculiarly blue and distant effect. But the idea one would naturally get from the name is of a refuge for birds of prey, eagles condors, vultures; the home of vast numbers of the feathered tribes, wheeling and screaming above peaks beyond the reach of man. Now, the Great Eyrie did not seem particularly attractive to birds; on the contrary, the people of the neighborhood began to remark that on some days when birds approached its summit they mounted still further, circled high above the crest, and then flew swiftly away, troubling the air with harsh cries.

Why then the name Great Eyrie? Perhaps the mount might better have been called a crater, for in the center of those steep and rounded walls there might well be a huge deep basin. Perhaps there might even lie within their circuit a mountain lake, such as exists in other parts of the Appalachian mountain system, a lagoon fed by the rain and the winter snows. ..."Jules Verne

This fantastic image of the Linville Gorge is still found in the many stories of the "Brown Mountain Lights"  a mysterious phenomenon that periodically  sends balls of light racing up out of the gorge or suspends the luminous lights along the tops of near-by mountains. Whether the lights are the result of what is known as the pismo electrical effect or is the result of gases floating up from the floor of the gorge --- or both, is not known.  The mystery of the gorge is still working its magic on the visitor. 

See:  Riley, Robert B. "The Visible, Visual, and the Vicarious:  Questions about Vision, Landscape and Experience," in Understanding Ordinary Landscape, ed. by Paul Groth and Todd W Bressi.

While much has been made of the British and European origins of the aesthetics of parkways and parks, the struggle of rural against the industrial urban found in early English literature, has also been implicated in shaping our understanding of parkways. A poem, "the Deserted Village," (1770) by British poet Oliver Goldsmith is much quoted, as it captures the essence of a paradise lost in the advance of economic progress.

These brief quotes in Goldsmith's 1770 poem,  voice the late eighteenth century feelings of dispossession: 

... The man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds,
Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds;
The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth,
Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth;
His seat, where solitary sports are seen,
Indignant spurns the cottage from the green ...

But times are alter'd; Trade's unfeeling train
Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain;
Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose,
Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose;
And every want to luxury allied,
And every pang that folly pays to pride.
Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,
Those calm desires that ask'd but little room,
Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene,
Lived in each look, and brighten'd all the green-
These, far departing, seek a kinder shore,
And rural mirth and manners are no more. ...

There is a sense in these brief poetic laments that an agrarian and robust polity was being eviscerated by manners that were somewhat effeminate and certainly transforming of agrarian lifestyle.  The rural farmer, once proud and productive and held in high esteem by the general population, was left dejected, and estranged by the shift in cultural emphasis and the degradation of his land.  The farmer's land had always held memory and hope, but the emerging English culture re-framed those memories and that hope into a sentimental and romantic landscape that failed to reflect the pragmatic and essential attachment that farmers often have for soil.  It was not that those who worked the land were without aesthetic appreciation,  they were just not as articulate as those who re-wrote the landscape and shifted the cultural perspective based on their more urban sensibilities. It was the city, the urban life, that has been suggested as the source for the romantic appreciation of nature for the reader of both text and image and it was often urban literature that stole away the land and reframed it in the image of a park.  Samuel Johnson writing in 1751 noted that, "There is, indeed, scarce any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy."  By isolating this privacy, the writers established their claim on the land as a landscape of pleasure framed by an agrarian ideal.

Yet, as an aesthetic, "wilderness" is not the same as the agrarian ideal.  It is both a state of mind and a value of preservation.  Wilderness is both the sublime and the beautiful as well as a place of toughness and virility; it is an ambiguous space that in a strangely ironic way, is a space that could now be used to describe our cities. This irony carries over into our popular culture and the layers of landscape aesthetics found in our contemporary literature and film is broadly shaped by the residue of wilderness and the echoes of the sublime ad the beautiful.  For example, in the cinematic work of Frederick Wiseman's documentary, "Central Park," a modernist vision of both chaos and order can be found. The frequency of violence in the "wilderness" of city parks is a constant theme in literature and film. Instead of raising the moral fiber of the polity, the park is often depicted as the landscape of barbarity, where raw emotions are let go and Gothic dramas are played out under the dark and sublime forests. Nothing could more dramatically depict this than the recent production of the futuristic film, "The Hunger Games," based on the 2008 novel of Suzanne Collins.

"Wilderness" is both Eden and wildness; refuge and terror.

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