A quote from The Geography of Bliss, a surprisingly interesting read.
Space and time, the two dimensions we humans inhabit, are closely linked. "Landscape is personal and tribal history made visible," wrote the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his book Space and Place. What he means, I think, is that places are like time machines. They transport us back to years past. As Rebecca Solnit observes in her lovely, lyrical book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, "Perhaps it's true that you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scene of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of fateful decisions; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal."Geography is memory, as I've always maintained; glad someone else agrees with me.
And this, from the section on Thailand:
I continue to meander through Bangkok. Asian cities are tough nuts to crack. So much remains invisible in plain sight. Somerset Maugham observed this when he traveled the region in the 1920s. "They are hard and glittering... and give you nothing. But when you leave them it is with a feeling that you have missed something, and you cannot help thinking that they have some secret that they have kept from you."Erm yes well, the secret is probably that you're a foreigner who's interrogating the landscape from the wrong cultural perspective. It's not *for* you, after all. But I may have to read some Maugham after all just to see someone else describe this thing I've felt myself.
Mhh- note that Tuan has some very interesting sounding books, including The Landscapes of Sherlock Holmes. Reference library only, rottit...
