Raw Impressions: Cleveland Hills Above a Blanket of Mist

Certainly, nothing whatsoever about this view of the Cleveland Hills evokes the word “recrudescence”—though it is oddly suited to today’s general mood. In the 20th century, “recrudescence” came to signify the reappearance of anything thoroughly unpleasant after a period of respite—war, plague, outrage, crime. The 18th-century meaning was more viscerally satisfying: wounds “breaking out afresh,” “becoming raw again”—all derived, aptly enough, from the Latin crudus, meaning “raw.”

But let us turn our attention back to the photograph. My eyes were drawn, irresistibly, to the low-lying mist cloaking the Vale of Cleveland, while the morning sun attempted a weak, futile breakthrough through the thick sky. In the foreground, the flagged path ascends Little Roseberry, circling a single oak tree—a scene of almost laughable solitude.