Escapism

In prehistoric times, our ancestors began building shelters and planting crops in order to escape nature's harsh realities. Today, we flee urban dangers for the safer, reconfigured world of suburban lawns and parks. According to the author of this work, a cultural geographer, people have always sought to escape in one way or another, sometimes foolishly, often creatively and ingeniously. Glass-tower cities, xuburbs, shopping malls, Disneyland - all are among the most recent monuments the author identifies as efforts to escape the constraints and uncertainties of life - ultimately, those imposed by nature. "What cultural product," he asks, "is not escape?" Opening with a discussion of the history of human efforts to transform nature, a topic familiar to any student of cultural geography, the scope of the work broadens to find escapism in a range of social mechanisms and cultural artefacts. Like culture itself, escapism is shown to be a product of the imagination and abstract thought, and Tuan devotes the last chapters of the book to examining the human imagination's potential to create on earth the extremes of heaven and hell.