When an idea or a phenomenon becomes widely familiar, it is easy to forget that it came from somewhere, that there is a specific historical moment (of indeterminate duration) before which the thing did not exist.
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Among the few positive things we humans may do that other species don’t is to create Places. We can quibble about the details, but most people who have thought seriously about the matter would recognize a few necessary components in any satisfactory definition: places, like landscapes, do not occur naturally; they are artifacts. A place is not a landscape; places are contained within landscapes. Place is a possibility wherever humans linger, but it’s not inevitable. Sometimes we just occupy space. Places can be created intentionally or as a side effect of other actions with other intentions. Place seems to be more likely to come into being the longer we stay put, but many nomadic cultures roam in landscapes whose minutest features are named, recognized, and given a place in the story of a people and a world.
Place has something to do with memory.
The evidence of the actions of human beings in a specific locale constitutes a physical version of memory. In the visible traces of their passage I read the investment of desire, hope, ambition, sweat, toil, and love of people who set this location apart from raw space. I don’t need to identify the origin of every feature to sense its significance. The intentions of the inhabitants may be opaque to me; I only need to be aware that intentions were acted on here. Long-enduring Places demonstrate Wright Morris’s dictum that the things we care about don’t so much get worn out as worn in. Some would go further and say that the vital energies, positive and negative, that are discharged on a site create a psychic echo chamber in which what happened there can continue to reverberate indefinitely. It is that faith which informs Joel Sternfeld’s pictures of locations associated with horrific crimes, utopian communities, and the civilization of ancient Rome, moments whose perturbations can persist for millennia.
Human history takes many forms, some material, some mental. Place partakes of both. One way to define Place in a few words, in fact, might be as a unique and significant intersection in space of human history and natural history. Is the Grand Canyon a Place? In what sense? When did it become a Place? When the first human being set eyes on it? When the first band of Archaic hunters camped on its rim or along the river at the bottom? When the first story about it was made? The first permanent settlement? When the first photograph was taken? When Congress made it a National Park? Or was it when the uplift of the Colorado Plateau and the downcutting of the Colorado River began 17,000,000 years ago?
Human effort did not create the Grand Canyon, but human ingenuity exploits it as a tourist destination and human imagination recognizes in it a potent emblem of American singularity, grandeur, and mighty destiny. Prior to the Twentieth Century, it seems to me, this public sense of Place was predominant. Places are elements in a symbolic discourse about History, which is itself a theater of Power whose actors strive for the right to determine the future, their own and everyone else’s.
The notion of place I began sketching a moment ago is by contrast suited to smaller aggregations of people- tribes, bands, families of all kinds, down to single individuals- rather than nations. I take it that the experience of Place I’m trying to articulate has been around a long time, maybe as long as the human species. Maybe it begins in the perception that some locations offer more than others, in food, resources, security, or comfort. But it’s one thing to have an experience, another to reflect on it
Thoreau is the first writer to devote himself single-mindedly to what has come to be known as The Literature of Place. Thoreau doesn’t talk about Place as a concept, he enacts it. He writes in, from, and to the territory he writes about; the idea informs everything he does: his daily walks, his work as a surveyor, where he travels, what he notices, what he writes about, what he thinks. The Romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth, were similarly inspired by the qualities that inhered in certain treasured locations. But where Thoreau’s aim is to comprehend with greater and greater clarity the vast system of Nature by minute observation of its ordinary transactions, the Romantics seek Transport; their observations and perceptions are important to the degree that they are a platform from which the Imagination can begin its flights to higher realms of being. They continually contrast an unsatisfactory present with an exalted state, timeless and placeless, to which certain natural scenes offer a portal, leaving behind ordinary nature with its ceaseless round of generation, mortal struggle, and extinction. Thoreau, on the other hand, no matter how far he travels, imaginatively or bodily, returns to the here and now of Concord and the Nineteenth Century. Transcendence exists in the present moment or not at all. “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.”
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In a secularized paraphrase of the Biblical “for what doth it profit a man if he gain the world and lose his own soul?” Thoreau reminds us that “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.” His remedy for himself is simple: “ [I] Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.”
For Thoreau pursuing an intimate knowledge of your surroundings is valuable because it grounds you in the concrete, in the Now, and helps you hold on to yourself in a time of incessant, dizzying change. What we now call a Sense of Place was for Henry Thoreau just a matter of planting your feet solidly somewhere so that the soul can take root and be nourished by the connection. Where is inconsequential, since wild nature thrives in the cracks of a sidewalk. Someone who could say “Convince me you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect Wonders,” would not accept living in a city as a adequate excuse for not paying grateful attention to where you are.
In the concluding chapter of Landscape and Memory Simon Schama observes: “…although we generally think of Thoreau as the guardian of wilderness, one of his most powerful passions was for the local and intimate; hence the force of his wonderful oxymoron: ‘I have traveled a good deal in Concord.’ He had indeed, and it is from the close familiarity of those ‘travels’ that the unparalleled vividness and precision of his nature writing arises.”
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