Seeing an object in its original place delivers a thrill no specimen can match

Evidence

All over the western country, you are likely to come upon bits of petrified wood—not of the gorgeous hues of the logs in Petrified Forest National Park, but easily identifiable as fragments of trees that once grew in places perhaps now desert, but formerly inundated by some invading sea. One day I toiled several miles up a sweltering dry creek bed just to have a look at the stump of a petrified tree of which I had been told. It was not much to look at. What had been the trunk was hardly more than a foot above the ground, and even that part was badly broken. But the roots of the tree were there. Itwas in place. That was the very spot where it had actually sprouted, grown, and later been overwhelmed. I felt rewarded. It was a thrill. No vagrant chips could satisfy like that. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 710

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘in place’ reward ties to disturbance history and land-use change — Reading the Landscape’s core method of reading present landscape structure. — connects to: Parks offer firsthand acquaintance with nature that books cannot supply — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 708; Perceived authenticity of a thing heightens its aesthetic value — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 265; An object’s being shifts between use and detached observation. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 215 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Perceived authenticity of a thing heightens its aesthetic value #corroborates (0.85) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 265
• Photographic reproduction replaces the real building as the consumed object #contradicts (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 316
• Display glass created the distance that made goods into objects for a gaze #corroborates (0.78)
• An object’s being shifts between use and detached observation. #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 215
• An object as phenomenon includes anticipation, warmth, and felt promise, not just sense data #expands (0.72)