David Rodriguez. The View from Above in American Literature: Aerial Description, the Imaginary and the Form of Environment

Towards the end of The View from Above in American Literature, David Rodriguez ends with a suggestion that nature is always already mediated and represented. He draws from spatial theorist Gaston Bachelard’s idea of still waters, in which Bachelard suggests that humans and nature share a ‘will to contemplate’ (p. 178): the still pool has already seen and reflected the natural world back to the viewer, so the human figure can only contemplate nature as a reflexive form, after nature has done its representational work. The ‘eye of nature’ undergirds not only the earth’s watery topographies but its aerial atmospheres, and the way humans see and describe the environment from up above.