When we look at a landscape, we probably aren’t thinking about it as a clamorous system of self-proclamations.
Gerard Manley Hopkins saw it that way. For Hopkins, each thing in creation is continually proclaiming itself just by being. In the unconscious flutter of wings is the dramatic force of a being dealing out its inmost self.
Hopkins understood that identity was not just what we see at the surface. Instead, identity permeates the entirety of a person or thing. He called the essence of a thing the inscape: the complex and unified system of characteristics that make a thing unique and distinguish it from others….