The golf course sums up post-Enlightenment Western experience of landscape well. The golfing landscape is viewed as a passive backdrop to action: something that you play on rather than engage with, some thing that can be measured in empirical terms (each hole numbered, given a length in yards, a difficulty rating as a "par") rather than sesually experienced, something that is frozen in time (the grass isn't allowed to get any longer, the trees are not allowed to spread to the fairways, etc) rather than a living a giving environment, and something that should only be understood in a prescribed way (one must start at the first hole and play them all in order, one must dress in the correct way, one must follow the rules laid down by the club, etc). It is an appropriation of a once much more egalitarian landscape in terms of both physical control and ordering of social action. Dead places of strictly controlled ritual, no past and no furture - they just are.
