Cyclicity in Landscape: Its Reality in Nature and Clash with Human Civilizational Progress

Abstract

Seeking to understand how landscape’s dualities serve as the basis for its inherently natural cyclicity in Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod brings us to a clearer recognition of its odds with the American ideal of unidirectional progression. The natural landscape’s discontinuous cyclicity and its connection to human civilization’s cyclical theory of history lead us to a discussion of its conceptual clash with Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism. Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire paintings show how the landscape’s natural cycle is linked to the rise and fall of human civilizations built atop it. This paper, through analysis of Thoreau and Cole’s works, will examine how the environmental landscape’s natural cycle is irrevocably linked to that of human civilization. In doing so, we enter a more detailed discussion of how natural cyclicity in the landscape serves as a source of American fear of disruption to their nation’s ongoing progress.