The immediate garden and the larger landscape

摘要

In Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia, a modem character, Valentine, tries to grasp the pattern of the grouse population over several decades on a Derbyshire country estate; to do so he enters data from the mansion's old game books into a computer. He explains this research as the attempt to seize and identify a tune emerging from all the noisy business and happenstance. These 'noises', the intriguing details of so many particular shoots and their participants, are many and distracting (also often fascinating).