"I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all"
About this Quote
Nash takes the sing-song piety of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" and twists it into a grim little vaudeville routine: the joke lands, then it keeps landing. The opening line is a parody so clean you can hear the original hymniness underneath it, which is exactly the point. He borrows a tone built for reverence and uses it to praise the least reverent object imaginable: the billboard, that loud rectangle of commerce squatting between you and the horizon. The laugh arrives on the word "lovely" - a syrupy adjective made suddenly suspect when applied to advertising.
Then Nash tightens the screw. "Perhaps" is faux-modest, but it introduces the real menace: not just that billboards are ugly, but that they are winning. "Unless the billboards fall" reads like a mock-heroic prayer and an understated call to action; it frames outdoor advertising as an occupying force that must be toppled before nature can even be perceived. The punchline isn't aesthetic, it's ecological and psychological. The problem isn't only what gets built, it's what gets blocked: attention, sightlines, a sense of the public commons.
Written in an America racing into car culture, highways, and mass marketing, the couplet captures a specific mid-century anxiety: that modern life doesn't merely distract from the natural world, it replaces it with a monetized veneer. Nash's genius is making that replacement feel inevitable - and ridiculous - in the same breath.
Then Nash tightens the screw. "Perhaps" is faux-modest, but it introduces the real menace: not just that billboards are ugly, but that they are winning. "Unless the billboards fall" reads like a mock-heroic prayer and an understated call to action; it frames outdoor advertising as an occupying force that must be toppled before nature can even be perceived. The punchline isn't aesthetic, it's ecological and psychological. The problem isn't only what gets built, it's what gets blocked: attention, sightlines, a sense of the public commons.
Written in an America racing into car culture, highways, and mass marketing, the couplet captures a specific mid-century anxiety: that modern life doesn't merely distract from the natural world, it replaces it with a monetized veneer. Nash's genius is making that replacement feel inevitable - and ridiculous - in the same breath.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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