Layers of influence on an individual's response to place Anonymous 12th Grade

Both Alain De Botton’s The Art of Travel and Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’ successfully represent the many layers of influence on an individuals response to a landscape. They particularly reflect this through the influence of the individuals prior attitudes and experiences on their later responses.

Alain De Botton represents the many layers of influence on his response to the natural landscape as he has a real experience of a London neighbourhood park. In representing this influence, he metaphorically compares the grass to a ‘forbidding arena’, highlighting his existing emotions of despair, finding ‘ready encouragement in the sodden dark-red brick buildings’ which ultimately act as this initial influence in how he will come to perceive the landscape. However his real experience of this ‘desolate spread of mud and water’ acts as an additional layer of influence that prompts him to having a remembered experience in the same park that provides him with a similar sense of the connection he has ‘as much at home in the world as in my own bedroom’. It is the fact that he had this initial experience that influences how he now responds, with despair, but is also what prompts him to have the remembered experience of how beautiful it...