Most
readers think of literature in terms of characters, plot or philosophical
ideas, but there is another kind of writing that focuses on love of
place. In these books a sense of place is much more than the setting.
It explores the author's strong personal connection to a place.
Books about love of
place are among my favorites. It is possible to love a place as much
as the people who live there, but it is difficult to make this relationship
persuasive. Mere description is not enough: the author must imbue the
place with an emotional texture that feeds the reader's imagination.
A few good examples
come to mind. In "Walden" Henry David Thoreau interweaves
philosophy and mysticism with perceptive observations of the natural
environment and his reaction to the "moiling" ways his neighbors
have chosen to live. The book has a scientific attention to detail,
but it is Thoreau's internal monologue that establishes the inspirational
tone of the writing. Thoreau sees Walden Pond in poetic terms, a miniature
version of the universe at large. The wild animals who inhabit the area
possessed a sacred innocence that he found lacking in the human residents:
"In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats
in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and button-woods in the
other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they
had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running
over to a neighbor's to gossip."
Thoreau
describes how the woods cast a spell of enchantment over him: "Sometimes,
in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny
doorway from sunrise til noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and
hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while
the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until
by the sun falling in my west window, or the noise of some traveller's
wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I
grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better
than the work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted
from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance."
Thoreau came to realize
that solitude doesn't cause loneliness as long as we keep company with
our highest thoughts. "I went to the woods because I wished to
live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see
if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out
all the marrow of life . . ."
Two
other love of place masterpieces were written by women. "Cross
Creek" by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings details her experience of operating
a citrus farm in a remote region of Florida during the 1920s and 30s.
Although Rawlings was most famous for her novel "The Yearling,"
this autobiography offers an even more mesmerizing sense of place. The
Florida wilderness is rendered as a metaphor of hope in the face of
relentless adversity: "When I came to the Creek, and knew the old
grove and farmhouse at once as home, there was some terror, such as
one feels in the first recognition of human love, for the joining of
person to place, as of person to person, is a commitment to shared sorrow,
even as to shared joy." Her new home became a spiritual retreat
in times of hardship. "I do not understand how anyone can live
without one small place of enchantment to turn to . . ."
Rawlings'
description of floating down the stream in a trance is pure magic: the
landscape becomes a reflection of the desperate inner reality she was
experiencing in the moment. Her simple country neighbors seem
larger than life in the rugged setting depicted so eloquently by Rawlings.
She believed that the earth can be used but not really owned. "Cross
Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons,
to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time."
"Out
of Africa" is Isak Dineson's personal odyssey at the end of the
colonial era in Kenya. Dineson, whose real name was Karen Blixen, owned
a coffee plantation in the East African hill country she learned to
love much more than her native Denmark. She recalls her close friendship
with famous British ex-patriates like aviatrix Beryl Markham and white
hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, but the real beauty of the book is evident
in her affectionate feeling for the place, the wildlife and the native
people:
"In
the day-time you felt that you had got high up; near to the sun, but
the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights
were cold. The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made
for greatness and freedom, and unequaled nobility . . . The chief feature
of the landscape, and of your life in it, was the air. Looking back
on a sojourn in the African highlands, you are struck by your feeling
of having lived for a time up in the air. The sky was rarely more than
pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing
clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigour in it,
and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods
a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the
land, like a flame burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running
water, mirrored and doubled all objects . . . Up in this high
air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness
of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here
I am, where I ought to be."
Dineson
was such an admired writer Ernest Hemingway thought she deserved the
Nobel Prize for Literature more than he did when he won it in 1954.
Another important book
about love of place is Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again."
A recollection of his childhood in Asheville, North Carolina, the novel
is ostensibly about relationships within a family, but its over-arching
theme is the meaning of a place called home. You can't go home again
because it's not there anymore as you remember it. The reason for this
is two-fold: the place has changed in your absence and more importantly
you are no longer the same person.
Which
brings me to a psychological definition of place. A place is NOT merely
an objective location or collection of geographical attributes. Only
an android would perceive a place in such terms. For humans a place
is an emotional abstraction consisting of landscape, people and experiences
anchored in time and memory. What we remember about a place is more
real to us than the physical reality which confronts our senses. And
what we remember is always colored by fantasy or desire to some degree.
We feel blessed when
we live in a place that is beautiful or fascinating -- and cursed with
melancholy nostalgia after we leave and can only remember the way it
was. But what exactly did we love so much? Was it the place itself?
Or the person we were when we lived in that place -- younger, more hopeful,
full of dreams. Perhaps we love the person we used to be and unconsciously
transfer this emotion to the place we remember.
Every
culture has a myth of a golden age in its past, proving that people
think the same in groups as they do individually. I live in Hawaii,
which has a very comfortable climate and lush tropical scenery, but
I am haunted by the feeling that Hawaii used to be more beautiful 20
or 30 years ago. The native Hawaiians have a similar feeling, only they
think the islands were more beautiful centuries ago before the first
haoles (outsiders) darkened their horizon. It all depends on your point
of view. If I arrived on a jet airliner today for my first look at Hawaii,
I suspect that I would find it just as beautiful as I did when I originally
saw it in 1972.
Of
course the islands have changed in the past 30 years, but not nearly
as much as I have. Perception becomes jaded with old age while memories
of youth never change. Thoreau left his Walden Pond home after two years
and never lived there again. He recaptured his youthful experiment in
middle age when he wrote down his memories of it. As Rawlings grew older,
she spent an increasing amount of time away from Cross Creek at the
beach resort of St. Augustine, but she faithfully recorded her early
days in the central Florida wilderness. Dineson sold her African farm
and returned to Denmark to write about her adventures in Kenya after
the colonial lifestyle was well on its way to disappearing. Wolfe could
only go home again in the stories he wrote years later.
I
think a period of gestation must elapse before a writer can do justice
to a place he loves. The specialness of a place is taken for granted
in the heat of the moment. Like Adam, the writer can appreciate his
Eden only in retrospect. Since the place is part memory, he is not able
to write well about it until nostalgia mediates the cold facts. The
writer has to straddle two places at once to recreate his past in words.
