Turn Every Page: the importance of place
How particular places help us find our own place
Where are you from? In Arizona, we live among a lot of transplants. It’s interesting when you find someone who was born and raised here, and it’s very surprising when you meet someone whose family has lived here for generations. Arizona is a place many people come to. And when they are asked, “Where are you from?”, the answer is less likely to be “Arizona” and more likely to be “New York,” “Chicago,” “the Midwest,” “California,” or something else. When we answer that question of where we are from, why do we first seem to think of where we grew up as a child? I’ve lived in Arizona for almost 20 years, and I still respond with some form of, “Well, I’ve been in Arizona since 2005, but I’m originally from Ohio.” Apparently, 19 years is not quite enough time for me to mentally associate this as where I am “from.”
Physical places have a particular meaning for us. When I was growing up, people in my parents’ generation would talk about where they were when President Kennedy was killed. In my generation, people know where they were the morning of September 11. These places are connected to particular memories that become more vivid when we are back in the place where the memory was formed. I went back to Washington, DC last fall for the first time in 18 years. Much of the city had changed—gentrification in areas that were run down, condos and offices in areas where there had been nothing. But my memories of DC from 18 years before came flooding back. Even though I was out of practice navigating the Metro, I remembered particular people, activities, even the smells and sounds of the past. All of that came back merely by being in the place.
In his 1905 lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Edmund Husserl investigates perception and memory as part of our time-consciousness. Essentially, when we remember something, Husserl says that everything about the object as it was perceived is re-presented in the intention of memory. For example, if I had a pet dog when I was younger, the re-presentation of the dog in my memory includes the temporal aspect of my dog—how it existed in at a particular time—but it also includes other aspects of the dog as well, “since the memory of an earlier event includes the reproduction of the appearances in which it came to be given.” Husserl, Internal Time, 60. When I remember my dog, I remember buying it and watching it run around the house; I remember the people who sold the dog to me, and I even remember how it looked after it got in a fight with another dog that one Friday afternoon. My memory of the dog is more than a mere image of it; my memory is a re-presentation of the dog in its fullness, as much as it was presented to me in my original perception, with all its attributes.
In a memory, “the whole complex of the earlier consciousness is reproduced.” Husserl, Internal Time, 60. That is why I can remember where I was standing on September 11 when I saw the coverage and where I was standing when I saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon across town. These memories feel like it was yesterday when you are in the place where they happened.
So why do particular places have such significance? David Grann’s first book, The Lost City of Z, chronicles his attempt to get to the bottom of the life’s work of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett.[1] Fawcett was a British explorer consumed with the idea that there was a lost civilization in the middle of the Amazon in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil. Fawcett spent years pursuing his goal of finding “Z” while many doubted its existence, while he suffered innumerable setbacks, and while he had many years of disappointment for not finding it. In 1925, Fawcett and his son mysteriously disappeared in the jungle, never to be seen or heard from again.
It never seemed that Fawcett hoped to find an actual civilization, but more likely expected to find ruins and remains of a once-great civilization. Centuries of explorers had recounted stories of seeing “white Indians” or Grecian Amazonian Warriors—all women—who roamed the area. The accounts varied widely, but some common threads ran through all the stories. People spoke about wide roads, large buildings, a fairly advanced civilization for the time and the remote location. When Grann arrived at the place where the civilization was supposed to have been, he found “the remains of a massive man-made landscape. There was not just one moat but three, arranged in concentric circles. There was a giant circular plaza where the vegetation had a different character than that of the rest of the forest, because it had once been swept clean. And there had been a sprawling neighborhood of dwellings, as evidenced by even denser black soil, which had been enriched by decomposed garbage and human waste.”[2]
Later, Heckenberger showed Grann that “he had uncovered twenty pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu. The settlements were about two to three miles apart and were connected by roads. More astounding, the plazas were laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and the roads were positioned at the same geometric angles.”[3] Fawcett was actually on to something. He had, perhaps, found what he was looking for.
But the search for a place like “Z,” as described by Grann, is a search for something far more than the ruins of a city. Fawcett was an explorer his whole life, but reading Grann’s book gives you the distinct impression that Fawcett was looking for something within himself. He was trying to see whether he had it in himself to do something great. He, as an amateur, was looking for validation from the professionals. He was trying to find his own place in society.
“Place” is not only geographical. Finding your place is an effort of self-discovery and identifying what your end is—your telos. What are you here to do? In his book, In But Not Of, Hugh Hewitt gives Christian believers some thoughts on how to find your place and purpose. Other authors from other religious traditions likely offer similar advice. Hewitt’s underlying thesis is that if you are a believing Christian, that belief should animate your life and work in a profound way. It’s not enough to give lip service to your beliefs. You need to actually live them out. That is part of finding your place: in your work, in society, in your community.
To do that effectively, we need to take in a lot of information about a variety of things. Once piece of advice Hewitt gives is that everyone should, before starting a professional career and family, or at the start of it, live in either Los Angeles, New York, or Washington, DC. These are that centers of culture, finance, and government, and living in any of them gives you a different perspective on the world. If you grew up in the Kansas farmland, Times Square could be quite a culture shock. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Exposure to different ideas, people, and ways of living is enriching. And being in one of those places can help a person find their own place.
Cities have often served that purpose for centuries. There are numerous stories about people traveling to New York or Los Angeles to make it big, or at least to figure themselves out. As the cast of Hamilton sings about New York, “History is happening in Manhattan and we just happen to be in the greatest city in the world.” It’s interesting to think: would the American Revolution have happened if those people had not gathered in that place?
Edward Glaeser argues in Triumph of the city: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier that cities are specifically built for such a purpose—they are the best kind of arrangement for people to come together, collaborate, develop interesting things, and, presumably, become better people as a result.
Others think that big cities are the exact wrong place to go to find your own “place.” Wendell Berry, in his The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, makes a forceful argument against the growth of the city. City-dwellers do not fare well in Berry’s analysis:
The cities subsist in competition with the country; they live upon a one-way movement of energies out of the countryside—food and fuel, manufacturing materials, human labor, intelligence, and talent. Very little of this energy is ever returned. Instead of gathering these energies up into coherence, a cultural consummation that would not only return to the countryside what belongs to it, but also give back generosities of learning and art, conviviality and order, the modern city dissipates and wastes them. Along with its glittering “consumer goods,” the modern city produces an equally characteristic outpouring of garbage and pollution—just as it produces and/or collects unemployed, unemployable, and otherwise wasted people.
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 137. Live in a city, and you will not find yourself, says Berry. You may even lose something of your humanity in that place:
But total human control is just as impossible now as it ever was— or so the available evidence constrains one to believe. Nothing, for instance, could be more organized than one of our large cities, with its geometric streets, its numbered houses, its numbered citizens, its charted routes and zones, its great numbers of police and other functionaries charged to keep order—and yet nothing could be more chaotic than one of these same cities during rush hour or after dark or during a riot or a garbage collectors’ strike. In the modern city unprecedented organization and unprecedented disorder exist side by side; one could argue that they have a symbiotic relationship, that they feed and thrive upon each other. It is not difficult to think of any number of such examples in government, education, industry, medicine, agriculture—wherever the specialist has come with his controls.
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, 70. The “specialist” for Berry is someone who is only trained to do one thing. Many specialists live and thrive in urban environments. But contrary to Berry’s broad, Jeffersonian liberal ideal of the life of an agrarian gentleman, specialization leads to “a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.” Unsettling, 22. To Berry, workmanship, care, conscience, and responsibility are the things that help someone find their place in the world. And those things are either not offered by the city, or they are more readily found in the country.
Some people criticizing Berry suggest that a city provides just as much of a possibility of finding yourself as the country, if it is done intentionally. Ari N. Schulman, in “Walker Percy and the Recovery of Place,” says this:
Through this struggle [to have a place reveal itself], place gains an experiential shape. The features of a particular place begin not just to look different from the features of another place, but to feel different and mean something different. Go to a city and find your way to somewhere new; take a walk or a drive through the streets of Washington, D.C., and you will begin to feel how it is a different place from Austin or San Francisco or New Orleans or Paris — how your possibilities for action are different and so too your possibilities for being. Finding your way around is how you begin to escape the realm of mere location and sight, wresting from it place and that elusive sense of the place.[4]
The struggle Schulman discusses is a process where we come to encounter a place as it is, to experience it fully, and to learn something about ourselves in the process.
Whether urban or rural, particular places deeply shape who we are. And places remind us of so much of those significant moments that formed us. When I think of my grandparents’ house, I can still smell the stale cigarette smoke, the particular smell of the kitchen, the feel of the table where we played cards and the hollow sound it made when you tapped it with silverware. I remember the creaking steps that led up to the attic that was a dormitory for visiting grandchildren. I remember the time I stayed with them while in grade school and slept in that attic when my parents were in Europe. I remember so much about that place. And what I remember about it was good.
Not all places conjure up good memories or feelings. Victims of crime or abuse may long after have a severe reaction to being in a particular place related to their experience. Sometimes they have to avoid certain places altogether. For an addict, place plays a positive and negative role. To avoid spiraling more into an addiction, an addict would do well to avoid the places where the drug of choice is available. But for the addict, the place has a certain pull because it is the source of the drug that they desire.
Memories of a place are not just stale images in one’s mind. The images and feelings about my grandparents’ house do not come back when I look at a photograph of my grandmother. The memory of a place is fundamentally different. “In contrast to such image-consciousness [pictures, paintings, etc.], reproductions [memories] have the character of the re-presentation of something itself.” Husserl, Internal Time, 61. My memory of my grandparents’ house is not an image in my head; it is not a picture. A picture would be one object (a piece of paper) representing another object (my grandma). In contrast, “Memory is the re-presentation of something itself in the sense of the past.” Husserl, Internal Time, 61.
What we store up as memories are not images of things we perceived at one time. Rather, we store up the earlier perceptions themselves. We store up the perceptions we once lived through. Then, when we actually remember, we do not call up images; rather, we call up those earlier perceptions. When these perceptions are called up and reenacted, they bring along their objects, their objective correlates. What happens in remembering is that we relive earlier perceptions, and we remember the objects as they were given at that time. See Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, 67-68. That’s why, for a trauma victim, going to a place can actually be a source of re-traumatizing them. For places that were good experiences—a wonderful family vacation, a honeymoon—going to these places years later can reignite the same feelings we had before.
Physical places in our past are as real to us today as the day we were there. Those places are filled with memories of things or people or places that shaped who we are today, for good or bad. Whether we are seeking to find ourselves by finding a lost civilization in the Amazon, or whether we are just happy to recall the experiences we had when we return to a particular place, physical places have a great effect on our own individual place in the world. Pay attention to them and see how they shape who you are.
Remember to turn every page. Enjoy your weekend. Please let me know whether you need anything.
Best, Aaron
* This was a very eclectic month of reading, as you can see. Do you have any recommendations of books to read? If so, put them in the comments.
[1] Grann has a shorter version of the book in a New Yorker article from 2005: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/19/the-lost-city-of-z
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/19/the-lost-city-of-z
[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/19/the-lost-city-of-z
[4] https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2014/07/walker-percy-recovery-place/