1. Introduction to the Philosophy of Place
M a TT hew G ildersleeve and a ndrew C rowden
Abstract
This book presents a number of different philosophical views about the meaning of place and integrates them together to better understand the relationship to self and to achieve “being at home in the world”. This introduction provides a literature review on place research with a specific focus on humanistic and phenomenological versions. A number of sections have been developed into themes which all form important categories for the chapters presented in this book. The conclusion of this book will return to these themes and integrate them with other aspects of place research and the arguments presented in the chapters that form this book. The sections of this introduction appear as follows: place, phenomenology, humanistic geography, home, not at home, journey and reach, power and place, place and the body, and place, self and identity. This introduction is important for thinking through the chapters that follow on individual philosophers such as Nietzsche, Sloterdijk, Foucault, as well as more broad areas of research including ecology, ontogenesis, bioethics and metaphysics. The conclusion will discuss how the chapters in this book provide us new insight into the question of place by focusing on the themes presented in the introduction as well as other relevant research on place. Our book achieves this by presenting a fusion of chapters which amplifies each to show how they all have an important contribution to an expanded understanding of self and our place in the world.
Outline of Book
“When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always 'outside' alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered” (Heidegger, 1927, p.89).
“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is
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nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked” (Jung 1961, p.225).
The philosophy of place is a complex topic. The way we understand place in this book cannot be easily reduced to a simple definition. Our aim in this book is to investigate the complexity of place and highlight the vastness of this concept. We take a phenomenological and humanistic approach to understanding place. This follows in a tradition of philosophers such as Relph, Seamon and Malpas among others. Relph (1976, p. 4) notes that place “is not just a formal concept awaiting a precise definition … clarification cannot be achieved by imposing precise but arbitrary definitions”. Furthermore, Seamon (1987, p. 20) says applying reductive and superficial definitions loses the “phenomenological essence of place as a psycho-social-environmental whole larger than the sum of its parts”.
Moore (2000, p. 208) provides an excellent way to express the difficulty of providing a simple definition for place. She says the “difficulty in defining the concept is in part due to its many layers of meaning”. Moore argues understanding place,
“is like trying to describe an onion. It appears simple on the outside, but it is deceptive, for it has many layers. If it is cut apart, there are just onion skins left and the original form has disappeared. If each layer is described separately, we lose sight of the whole. The layers are transparent so that when we look at the whole onion we see not just the surface but also something of the interior”.
As a result, place “has to be examined in terms of its parts as well as a whole, mindful that to focus strongly on one part, it is possible to lose sight of the whole concept itself” (ibid).
This book follows Seamon (2018) who says it is important to use a wide range of resources to investigate and explore place to “offer mutual illumination, amplification, and validation of place as a phenomenon”. Our book follows this method and brings together the varying chapters in the conclusion to give new insights to place. Seamon called this “method triangulation, whereby one source of evidence provides insights into other sources of evidence, and one’s understanding of the phenomenon is therefore deepened and strengthened” (ibid). This method can also give insight to a phenomenological and humanistic understanding of place. Gildersleeve and Crowden (2018, p. 96– 97) have previously argued that finding an authentic place (or home) in the world involves triangulation.
This book triangulates and brings together authors who give us insight into a number of dimensions of place. This book begins by highlighting the phenomenological method of analysis which provides us an interpretive
framework to understand place and draw together the various chapters. Next, we show how humanistic geographers have come to understand place which leads into a discussion of the fundamental concept of home which is essential to understand self and its relation to place. In this book we argue that to know the self is to feel “at home in the world” whereas to not know the self is to feel dislodged and “not at home in the world”. However, as this book shows it is not so simple as this because sometimes, we are required to go through “not being at world” to come to better know the self and feel “at home in the world”. This dialectic is discussed in this introduction in the section on “Journey and Reach” and is further detailed in the conclusion. Following this is an introduction to the relationship between power and place. This section is particularly important to the chapter by Matthew Gildersleeve on Foucault. As will become clear in his chapter and in the conclusion, there are powers that can dislodge us from feeling “at home in the world” and it is important to identify these, so we have resistance to establish ourselves authentically instead of being under the power of unconscious and ideological domination. After this there are two sections before the individual chapters begin. There is a section on place and the body to highlight how the body is one way of showing the constitution of place and to show that it separates and structures place for each individual. Finally, there is a focused discussion of the relationship between self and place and how they both mutually refer to each other. There is no place without self and there is no self without place. In the conclusion (Chapter 9) we revisit most of these topics and sections from the introduction to better understand how the individual chapters and authors of this book contribute to each theme. As a result, we see a discussion of phenomenology, humanistic geography, home and not at home, journey and reach, and Tim Cresswell’s writings on power as well as an analysis of the findings from this book presented in relation to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, who many consider the “father” of a phenomenological understanding of place.
Ultimately, we aim to build on the existing understanding of place presented in phenomenology and humanistic geography and apply this to a new understanding of various topics that have not been immersed in this place literature. Reciprocally these various topics on ecology, Nietzsche, Sloterdijk, power, Romanian culture, ethics and ontogenesis will provide a new understanding and appreciation of place. The authors of this volume have worked together before and are familiar with each other’s background and understanding of place. The authors of this book have been selected to write about and apply place in different directions but then the editors aim to bring this
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diverse work together to give a more holistic and wide-reaching understanding of place and self.
Place
One way to appreciate the complexity of place is that there can be objective and subjective approaches to define place. Doroud (2018, p. 111) says from “an objective view, place consists of observable physical and social attributes, such as material objects, spaces, and the presence of other people. In comparison, subjective perspectives focus on meanings, experiences and social interactions, viewing place as fluid, dynamic, experiential and relational. As a lived environment, place is interpreted by the individuals and constructed through social interactions, cultural values and shared meanings”.
However, we do not want to view place from just one of these perspectives in this book. We are inspired by Entrikin who argues “place is a concept which does not fit into standard methodological and epistemological categories. Conventional thinking which separates objective and subjective approaches, and which divides the particular from the general, does not apply. Place, he suggests, has to be viewed both with regard to the objective characteristics of location and in terms of subjective experiences” (Douglas et al., 2002). Furthermore, from “the decentered vantage point of the theoretical scientist, place becomes either location or a set of generic relations”. Alternatively, from the centered subjective view “place has meaning only in relation to an individual’s or a group’s goals and concerns”. He cites Tuan who says, “Place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning” (Entrikin, 1991, p. 10).
It is useful to gain more insight to place by distinguishing it from space. Barnes (2018, p. 10) says “definitions of space define it in terms of a continuous area or expanse that is available or unoccupied; in relation to quantifiable or measurable terms relating to volume or time; or in the context of positioning things apart or away from each other. Space, therefore, seems to be about absence, and is often discussed within a rational, scientific framework that seeks to define things quantitatively”. In contrast, “place is that of a specific position within space, or the act of putting something in a particular spot” (ibid). Furthermore, place can refer “a portion of space that is available to be used by someone; for example, a seat on the bus, a place at a table, or a desk in an office or classroom. This ‘peopling’ of place and the association of ownership, or perhaps belonging, brings us closer to understandings of place” (ibid) as presented in this book.
From this brief introduction to place it is apparent that people and place are closely linked where unlike “space, which can be literally defined as unoccupied, place is populated and both those occupying place and place itself − are reciprocally constructed” (ibid, p. 11). In other words, place involves personalizing our territory where “we transform an address or spatial location into our own place” (ibid).
The importance of place is highlighted when we note that a human being is always human being in place. Relph states that “to be human is to live in a world that is filled with significant places: To be human is to have and to know your place. In a sense this is about putting down roots and feeling secure” (ibid, p. 12). This is something we explore in detail in this book. Knowing your place and how it relates to wellbeing, self and home is important to understand the ontological and humanistic meaning of place we present. This chapter introduces this and the book as a whole will elucidate this from different angles, authors and topics. A substantial part of this introduction is devoted to place and its relation to home which can be understood “as a safe, secure, intimate and personal space, private as opposed to public, and offering control and freedom over what happens within it” (ibid). We elaborate how finding your place in the world allows one to feel “at home” through this freedom and control. Throughout this book it should become clear that “the uniqueness of place is such that no two people will have exactly the same experience of place” (Price, 2013, p. 122) and this allows all to find their own unique place, self, purpose and meaning in the world.
Throughout this book we will also elaborate the importance of understanding place from a dynamic perspective which “focuses on people’s ongoing, evolving relationships with places” (Smaldone, Harris, & Sanyal, 2005, p. 400). We emphasize that “each human being is unique, as well as everchanging, so too are places— if for no other reason than that the people who bestow meaning continually change, regardless of what happens to a particular setting” (ibid). As a result, this book supports future research “to move beyond understandings of place as simply ‘here’ – local, fixed, bounded, and, frequently, ahistorical” (Kemp, 2011, p. 3). Instead, we want future research to focus on a relational view of place which “conceptualizes it as process rather than entity – a fluid, dynamic field of constantly interacting elements, within and beyond itself” (ibid). Riccardo Carli’s chapter on Nietzsche in this book (Chapter 3) is very important in this regard and can be seen as congruent with Foucault’s ethics (O’Leary, 2006).
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Phenomenology
As stated earlier, our approach to reading the chapters in this book is phenomenological because, this perspective offers a way to move beyond the issue of understanding place as just “objectivist (i.e., interpreting place as an objective environment outside experiencers) or subjectivist (i.e., interpreting place as a subjective representation, whether cognitive or a ffective, inside experiencers)” (Seamon, 2018, p. 3). Instead, we argue that it is important to understand place as a lived experience and process whereby “human beings both shape and are shaped by the world of places in which they fi nd themselves” (ibid).
Furthermore, phenomenology is important to understand place because “there is a growing recognition that any dualistic conception of the peopleenvironment relationship is inadequate because of the lived fact that human beings are always conjoined, enmeshed, and immersed in their world. In other words, a relationship that is assumed conceptually to be two (people/environment) is lived existentially as one (people-environment intertwinement)” (ibid). Therefore, it is problematic to discuss or “assign specific phenomena to either self or world alone. Rather, the two must be envisioned together as the experienced wholeness of people-in-world” (ibid) to understand place authentically.
What we want to make clear for the reader is that place “is not an objective, spatial, geometric phenomenon like the Cartesian explanation” (Evans, 2015, p. 45). For example, from “Heidegger’s phenomenological perspective, we are not located in space-time. Instead, we are always somewhere more or less familiar. The existentially near place is somewhere Dasein understands through its disclosing of the place as place, and the existentially far space is somewhere that Dasein is unfamiliar with due to the character of its involvement with the other entities in that place” (ibid). This has important implications for understanding the self as being “at home” or “not at home” in the world which is discussed in Section 4 of this introduction and is important for conceptualizing the whole book.
This suggests that place identity or the self “cannot be reduced to the subjectivist realm of internal representations or to the objectivist realm of external social, economic, political, and cultural forces shaping environmental experiences, meanings, and actions. Rather, who we are is how we are emplaced” (Seamon, 2012, p. 18). In other words, who we are is dependent on relations to others and who others are depends on relation to us. Our place in the world “is complex and dynamic, and incorporates generative processes via which a place and its experiences and meanings shift or remain the same.
This lived emplacement also means that the quality of human life is intimately related to the quality of place in which that life unfolds and vice versa” (Seamon, 2014, p. 42).
To summarize, in this book we “focus on place as experienced by human beings, in contrast to space, whose abstractness discourages experiential explorations” (Casey, 2001, p. 683). This is very much in contrast to “the quintessential modernist view of the relation between place and self is that there is no such relation” (ibid). This view that we do not subscribe to is that place belongs entirely to the physical world and the self to consciousness, and the two never meet. For example, “Locke’s Essay, published in 1690, keeps personal identity and place as far apart as are mind and matter in Descartes’s writings fi fty years earlier” (ibid). Phenomenologies of place “contest the dichotomies that hold the self apart from body and place. Contra Descartes, the body is recognized as integral to selfhood, with the result that we can no longer distinguish neatly between physical and personal identity. Against Locke, place is regarded as constitutive of one’s sense of self” (ibid). We see a number of authors in their chapters unequivocally make this argument and apply to various topics.
Humanistic Geography
Seamon and Sowers (2008, p. 43) explain that beginning “in the early 1970s, geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan, Anne Buttimer, and Edward Relph grew dissatisfied with what they felt was a philosophically and experientially anemic definition of place. These thinkers, sometimes called ‘humanistic geographers,’ probed place as it plays an integral role in human experience”. Place, for humanistic geographers “was a concept that expressed an attitude to the world the emphasized subjectivity and experience rather than the cool, hard logic of spatial science” (Cresswell, 2014, p. 35). These geographers argued that place is “a universal and transhistorical part of the human condition. It was not so much places (in the world) that interested the humanists but ‘place’ as an idea, concept and way of being-in-the-world” (ibid).
Being-in-the-world is a phenomenological understanding of place derived from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and humanistic geographers invested in his ideas “as an anti-positivist critique of mainstream geography’s reduction of place to little more than location” (Williams, 2014, p. 75). This investment in phenomenological philosophy allowed geography to expand beyond “what Nagel (1986) described as the ‘view from nowhere’ and engage a view from somewhere or the perspective of a particular person inside the world” (ibid). Humanistic geography is important for understanding place because it insists
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“geographers needed to be more aware of the ways in which we inhabit and experience the world” (Cresswell, 2014).
Lived experience is fundamental to a humanistic approach to place and focusing on first person experience transforms “a scienti fic notion of space into a relatively lived and meaningful notion of place” (ibid). This highlights the “important contribution of humanistic geography to the discipline – the distinction between an abstract realm of space and an experienced and felt world of place” (ibid). Humanistic geographers also argue the “particular attributes— things and events— of places can shape the identity and understanding of people who live there. This dialogue between ourselves and places operates throughout our lives” (Morgan & Waite, 2017, p. 53). This is evident in a simple example where a “babies’ language acquisition is plastic and depends entirely on the context in which they are raised” (ibid).
The humanist tradition within geography is an important resource for understanding place because of its focus on lived experience in contrast to positivism and quantitative measure of physical space. These researchers are essential to uncover aspects of the human being because they “recoiled from the abstract theorizing of space as an objective entity and emphasized the subjective qualities of place” (Adam, Hoelscher, Till, 2001, p.19).
Home and Being at Home
Home is a fundamental aspect to understand the philosophy of place. Dovey (1985, p. 35) explains “Being at home is a mode of being whereby we are oriented within a spatial, temporal, and sociocultural order that we understand”. Furthermore “Home is a sacred place, a secure place, a place of certainty and of stability. It is a principle by which we order our existence in space. Home is demarcated territory with both physical and symbolic boundaries that ensure that dwellers can control access and behavior within” (ibid). Being at home in the world is about discovering an authentic existence which unveils the self in relation to place. This authentic existence of being at home “is to know where you are; it means to inhabit a secure center and to be oriented in space” (ibid). When an individual finds themselves at home in the world they experience “a center of security, of possessed territory, a place of freedom where our own order can become manifest, secure from the impositions of others. This aspect of home as a place of autonomy is also fundamentally linked to home as identity” (ibid). Thus, we can see that being at home is at the same time being at home with the self to discover an authentic identity. However, it is important to add to this that home also “suggests a certain dynamic adaptability. It allows for both the representation and the growth of identity” (ibid). This
means being at home is not a static phenomenon but one that requires ongoing action which “permits us to act upon and build our dreams” (ibid). This idea is important throughout this book and will involve extensive discussion particularly in the summary chapter. Being at home in the world is about feeling “ontologically secure” which is elucidated by Dupuis and Thorns (1998, p. 29) who
“state that ontological security is experienced in the home when the following four conditions are met:
i) home is a site of constancy in the social and material environment (security) ii) home is a spatial context in which day to day routines of human existence are performed (security) iii) home is a site where people feel most in control of their lives (stimulation) because they feel free from the surveillance that is part of the contemporary world (security) iv) home is a secure base around which identities are constructed (security and identity)”.
For Bachelard, the home is “a key element in the development of people’s sense of themselves as belonging to a place” (ibid). Being at home is important not only for understanding the self but it is “the key location in which a spiritual unity is formed between humans and things” (Easthope, 2004, p. 135). We see Carmen Cozma elucidate this unity between spirituality and place in Romania culture in this book (Chapter 6). To better understand the meaning of home it is important to recognize that it is often discussed “in the language of plants, especially in terms of roots. To have a strong sense of home and belonging is to have roots; to be forced to move is to be uprooted. This organic language is scarcely incidental. It implies that to have a home place is natural; it is metaphorically to belong to the earth” (Douglas et al., 2002). Luca Valera’s chapter (Chapter 2) illustrates this symbiotic relationship between humans and nature further. In other words, discovering home through place gives an individual a sense of rootedness to the world they belong to as well as a natural feeling of being in the place they should be. Furthermore, the roots of being at home in the world “give people a point of outlook and spiritual and psychological attachment to a particular place” (Windsong, 2010, p. 206). Finding a home in the world from the perspective of the phenomenology of place means “being inside and belonging to your place both as an individual and as a member of a community” (ibid).
When an individual finds their home in the world, they can open their “doors to the other (not-home) and also leave home in exploration of the other” (Day, 1998, p. 63). In other words, “home is found in the space of “distantiation,” within a space that holds forth and opens up the world in its
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nearness. Being at home brings us nearer to ourselves and to the world” (ibid). Moving from being not at home in the world involves hermeneutic understanding to overcome “remoteness and coming nearer to a sense of being at home in the world” (ibid). This process unfolds through “the dialectical interplay between comfort and anxiety, the familiar and the strange” (ibid). We see this journeying in Ricardo Carli’s chapter on Nietzsche (Chapter 3) and is integrated with other parts in the book in the summary (Chapter 9).
Day (1998, p. 64) importantly argues we “have developed the habit of building barriers, reasoning, and self-medicating in order to buffer ourselves from anxiety and depression. Yet it is only through an openness to ourselves and to the other, to the strange and uncanny, that we are able to hear and follow the call of conscience. How or if we take up this call is related directly to how we make our home”. This is important because it highlights that being at home in the world requires an openness to the other (including the anxiety and depression that may follow from this) and an individual will be not at home if this does not occur. Day adds more to our understanding of this by saying “Home is more than comfort and privacy, it is an active encounter with the world, a struggle to come to terms with our own limits and possibilities. The darker, uncanny side of home is generally overlooked (repressed) in most research, a situation which subsequently cuts us off from experiencing and describing the home’s deeper meaning. ‘Truth’ is ultimately homecoming” (ibid). What this means is that find a home in the world requires an openness to the other to discover the “truth” of our place in the world (see summary in Chapter 9). When an individual is authentic and resolute to achieve and discover this about the self they can also discover a deeper meaning about their home in the world. Thus, it is correct to say “our being-at-home is something that we as individuals must actively develop. It is our own space only if we make it our own” (Jacobson, 2009, p. 364).
A key figure in the philosophy of place is Bachelard who focuses on place as “the very way in which we find ourselves existentially at-home in a world” (Jacobson, 2010, p. 221). Bachelard’s argument suggests that being at “home is a way of finding a certain world comportment, of finding one’s own way of being-in-the-world. To be at-home is to have a developed and familiar way of engaging with and in one’s surroundings. Rather than an objective place, then, home is a style of being that one possesses” (ibid). This “style” is something we hope to elucidate in this book. This way of being at home in the world requires an openness to the other to find a comportment that is or is not possible for each individual. Being at home implies the individual has a clear understanding of their place in the world by being authentic to who they are through an engagement with the other.
As a result, to properly conceptualize home it is necessary to recognize “it is about belonging: a deep and often unnoticed familiarity that binds one to kin and community” (Dolezal, 2017, p. 104). This occurs when we have an open engagement with the world and our unique place which allows us to be “more grounded, safe, secure, and in tune with our surroundings” (ibid). Thus, home “is the site where one can realize oneself as a subject, not an object” (ibid). However, there are powers and constraints in life that can hide the possibility of this which are discussed by Matthew Gildersleeve in Chapter 5 of this book.
Before moving onto to discussing being not at home in the world it should be apparent at this point in the introduction that who and what you are is a function of where you are. The chapters in this book provide a series of reflections on “selfhood, location and ways of being placed in and displaced within human worlds” (Benson, 2002, p. 4). Each individual has their unique home in the world given or “thrown” to them and being at home requires the knowledge of “how to position ourselves in the worlds we inhabit and how to find our way around them. Skills in navigating human worlds are primary requirements for successful human being” (ibid).
Not at Home
Dolezal (2017, p. 105) explains that being at home “both literally and figuratively, invokes this feeling of security, ease, comfort, and privacy”. To not be at home would then suggests the opposite of this. Some authors contend that not being at home occurs when “we no longer understand who we are. One can live peacefully or dwell appropriately only if one knows, at some profound level, who one really is” (Seamon & Mugerauer, 1985, p. 249).
It is important to recognize that there can be “two forms of sense of place, ‘authentic and genuine’ and ‘inauthentic and contrived or arti ficial’ ” (Eyles & Williams, 2008). In other words, to be at home is to have an authentic experience of place whereas being not at home is to have an inauthentic experience of place. Eyles and Williams (2008) explain “an authentic sense of place is experienced by individuals who achieve a sense of belonging to place (e.g. their home, community or country) and thereby contributes to an individual’s identity. In contrast, an inauthentic sense of place results from the inability to develop a meaningful relationship with the environment”.
To be at home in the world “involves something more fundamental than the ego-subject. Heidegger suggests that a human being becomes ‘authentic’ when released from the compulsive activity of the ego” (Seamon & Mugerauer, 1985, p. 252). An individual is at home when “human existence functions
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to serve, not to dominate. In the moment of releasement, enlightenment, or authenticity, things do not dissolve into an undifferentiated mass” (ibid). When an individual is authentic and at home in the world, they discover their place to allow beings to “stand out or reveal themselves in their own unique mode of Being. Aware of the Being of beings, authentic human existence is also profoundly aware of the beings as such” (ibid).
Alternatively, being not at home is an “experience of displacement that alters a person’s sense of self, place, and belonging” (Vandermark, 2007, p. 243). Vandermark explains that when “we lose our place in the world or our role in society, the basic sense of self and belonging is diminished. A diminished sense of self and belonging produces anxiety and depression and diminishes social and functional abilities necessary for a healthy and meaningful life” (ibid). This highlights the issues of not being at home where “displacement exerts its damaging effects on anyone who loses a home and a place in society” (ibid). It is important to elucidate being at home and not at home and “the lived experience of displacement, recognition of the spatial nature of human perception, a focus on the sense of place as well as social connectedness” for health care professionals because it “may lead to better treatment that promotes a sense of self, place, and belonging in displaced people” (ibid).
Another way to understand not being at home is through “inside versus outside” which is an “important distinction with respect to identity, resting as heavily as it does on belonging and exclusion” (Price, 2013, p. 125). To be at home in the world is to belong and to not be at home is to be excluded. Price explains, place-making “by setting up boundaries, gives rise to the polarities of ‘in’ and ‘out,’ ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Being ‘in,’ an insider, is good; being ‘out,’ an outsider, is bad” (ibid). Being not at home or “outside” “can incite emotions of anxiety, dread, terror, and panic amongst humans, because it violates our elemental need for place predicated on experience, and leads to the existential predicament of place-bereft individuals” (ibid).
Being not at home can give a sense of “placelessness” which creates a loss of connection to self and others as well as meaningfulness. To be at home requires interaction with others and world to develop connection and belonging and if “we do not make connections, the sense of placelessness can render one’s perception of self as invisible, so we do not know who or what we are” (Purnell, 2017, p. 161). Therefore “if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are” (ibid). Not being at home occurs when an individual has not developed an authentic understanding of who they are in relation to others and the world which creates connections to place “formed through interactions developed over time” (ibid).
To be at home could be roughly described “as an implicit psychological structure. In the course of everyday life, we tend to overlook its significance because our place behaviour and sense of ‘being in place’ unfolds largely without conscious reflection” (Durrheim, Dixon, & Dixon, 2005, p. 185). Alternatively, being not at home can be experienced “at moments of change or transition, when the bond between person and place is threatened, the significance of place identity becomes apparent” (ibid). This not being at home or “loss of place tends to provoke strong social and psychological responses precisely because it entails a loss of self” (ibid). Being not at home can lead to “a profound sense of disorientation, as individuals are forced to adjust to alien surroundings or to return to a place that has been profoundly altered” (ibid). In the words of psychology vocabulary, “this experience is not merely cognitive and emotional in character. It also takes the form of a ‘bodily’ confusion as the corporeal routines, gestures and orientations that once gave meaning to life-in-place have been eradicated” (ibid).
Being not at home can also issue a “sense of alienation from a place that has been violated, degraded, or appropriated by others” (ibid) which is outlined by Matthew Gildersleeve with his chapter on disciplinary power (Chapter 5). An individual not at home in the world finds it difficult to “construct a sense of ‘home’ elsewhere, living with a perpetual sense of being ‘out- of-place or excluded” (ibid). This highlights the effect disciplinary power can have on the authenticity of an individual but also population. However, it is important to note that the “experience of being excluded from the world of inside space as well as the crossing of borders are fundamental experiences which create and endow self and identity” (ibid). Lengen, Timm, Kistemann (2018, p. 23) says the “experience of being outside is traumatic and indelible; Sloterdijk compared being outside with feelings of fear, panic, extemporaneity, being devoid of refuge, eeriness— in contrast to positive self- experiences of being familiar, intimate, grounded, and having refuge”. However, this “step outside is both a waking-up and a self- experience. The physical and conceptual act of being outside or inside, of crossing borders, presents a challenge and an opportunity to create self and identity” (ibid). Therefore, the reaction to disciplinary power is what matters where “a new place can be a positive challenge: a change in life providing an opportunity to find the self, to develop a deeper self- consciousness, to experience well-being amidst mental and physical tension, and to find relaxation and health” (ibid).
Journey and Reach
In this section we continue from the paragraph before, where we look at this process of creating and finding the self to develop a deeper self-consciousness through journey and reach. Being at home in the world is important for our book but it is also necessary to add a “further component: the notion of home and horizons-of-reach” (Cox & Holmes, 2000, p. 68). Buttimer argues home and reach are “like breathing in and out: breathing in represents ‘bringing home’, breathing out represents a reaching out to beyond the home” (ibid). As a result, “reach” “may be considered in terms of movement in and out of a place to regions beyond” (ibid) and this process is necessary to be at home in the world. As stated earlier, Ricardo Carli’s work (Chapter 3) has a big focus on this, but Jennifer Greenwood (Chapter 8) also provides some discussion of home and reach by referring to the ideas of humanistic geographer YiFu Tuan.
This is supported by Buttimer who argues “that personal identity and health require a balance of this dwelling and reaching; the location of one’s self in a restful and spirit-nourishing dwelling place, alongside the creation of a regional identity that reaching would strengthen” (ibid). This is also seen as a virtue where reach allows an individual to become “more responsive to differences between places— for example, by venturing beyond one’s natal place so as to appreciate and savor other places and peoples. Such is the ambiguous moral of Tuan’s Cosmos and Hearth (1996): the skeptical cosmopolite, for all of his or her unsettledness, does at least learn about the larger world and may become more sensitive to cultural diversity than does the person who refuses to leave the hearth” (Casey, 2001, p. 685). In other words, there is “virtue in the postmodern nomadism of constantly changing place” (ibid).
It is important to recognize that an authentic understanding of home is “porous and receptive to external influences. Following or anticipating these feelings of intrusion and estrangement, people may take refuge in their homes, be they common dwellings, gated communities or other regressive forms of closure” (Reinders & Van Der Land, 2008, p. 5). These responses that are not receptive are inauthentic and lead to not being at home in the world. To achieve “at-homeness” means to be open to the other through “the dialectic between permanency and movement, staying and leaving” (ibid). Encounters with the other in this way may result in discontinuity of at-homeness but going through this process is necessary for an individual to be authentic to their place in the world (see summary Chapter 9).
Thus, “knowing oneself fully then requires journeys into and through the context that defines us” (Harper, Carpenter, & Segal, 2012, p. 1) and
this is what achieves being at home in the world. Through reach and journeys the individual is provided “opportunities to develop a greater sense of place, a subsequently stronger sense of self” (ibid). By venturing beyond home to other and new places the individual embarks on a journey of self-discovery that “has a psychological and spiritual dimension that no ordinary map would show ” (ibid). Harper, Carpenter and Segal follow this to provide an “argument for (a) the utilization of journeys in nature to assist in developing sense of place, (b) that sense of place leads to greater sense of self, and (c) the act of journeying provides a pedagogical opportunity to experience place for a broad range of professionals”. Luca Valera’s chapter (Chapter 2) on ecology and place in this book follows this line of thought and looks at how our relationship with nature also leads to a deeper understanding of the self and our place in the world. Valera’s chapter allows us to better understand that by creating and forming a sense of place through journeying, “an extension of one’s identity to include relationships with natural places can occur” (ibid).
Journeying from the home to develop “a stronger connection with place can diminish experiences of the ‘existential vacuum’, a world devoid of meaning, and replace them with stories of interconnection, improved health, and individual and collective well-being” (ibid). Therefore, it is fundamental to understand that journeys “enable the surrounding environment to be the catalyst, the challenge, the inspiration, the solace, and the reward that generates a greater sense of belonging that connects people to place” (ibid). Compare this with the chapters by Ricardo Carli (Chapter 3) and Matthew Gildersleeve (Chapter 5) in this book.
From this we can integrate the words of Jacobson (2010, p. 224) who says although “Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty characterize the experience of being-at-home as one with a firm pole-like core, they also argue that beingat-home is an ongoing existential ‘activity’. Being-at-home is never a settled or completed project, nor is it secured by some object external to us such as a tangible house”. This is explored in some detail in Ricardo Carli’s chapter in this book but has also been linked to place before (Gildersleeve & Crowden, 2018). Therefore, it is necessary to understand that “being-at-home is the way in which we have established and continue to establish a sense of our ownness in the larger world. To be at-home is to find ourselves reflected in our setting and our situation and to experience this reflection as giving us a place where we can be ourselves” (Jacobson, 2010, p. 224).
Another way of describing how to be at home (dwelling) through action and journey is to say “just as we needed to grow into and to figure out how to inhabit our bodies, we also needed to learn how to dwell. In his phenomenological study of home, Anthony Steinbock argues that [m]aking ourselves
G ildersleeve and C rowden
at home as our world to which we belong entails more than a ‘sub-liminal’ belonging, but an active responsibility for setting limits, for repeating, for renewing the homeworld” (Jacobson, 2009, p. 362). This means it is imperative to understand and is clear from Matthew Gildersleeve’s chapter on disciplinary power and Jennifer Greenwood’s chapter on cognitive, emotion, linguistic development is that “home cannot be ‘given’ from any external perspective. Rather, it is generated developmentally and intersubjectively ” (ibid). Being at home in the world does not mean being “simply given a home and all that it entails. We are responsible for making our home, for making ourselves at home, and this is something we must learn how to do, and that we learn to do with and through other persons” (ibid).
Relph (1976, p. 42) also understands this when he says “There is not merely a fusion between person and place, but also a tension between them. The need to stay is continuously balanced with a desire to liberate oneself from the drudgery of place”. One must understand that being at home “can be experienced as limiting, as imprisoning, whereas the idea of a kind of placelessness can be an intimation of freedom. To escape or transcend place, even temporarily, is to dislocate the everyday sense of self and, thus, open up new possibilities of being, new dimensions of self” (Persson, 2007, p. 51). With this understanding of home and journey, being not at home or “placelessness, cannot be construed as only frightening; it also entices and hints at liberation, independence, wholeness, or universality” (ibid) and is necessary to expand an understanding of place and being at home in the world. This is complemented by Bachelard who argues that there is “a human need for ‘home’, ‘dwelling’, and ‘place’ and a simultaneous need for ‘space’, ‘vastness’, and ‘immensity’; a need for private corners and secret hideaways and a desire to fi nd connections to a larger universe” (ibid). Therefore, one way it seems important to conceptualize home is as “a place of rest from which we move outward and return, a place of nurture where our energies and spirits are regenerated before the next journey” (Dovey, 1985, p. 46).
The dialectic of home and journey “is not merely cyclical but rather is dynamic or spiral. In the traditional Hegelian sense, if home is the thesis and journey its antithesis, then the synthesis is a deepened experience of the phenomenon of home” (ibid). This is why journey is important for a deeper and widen understanding of self and place an is explored in extensive detail with reference to the work of Suvantola in the summary (Chapter 9). We can understand this further through the concept of appropriation. First, we should look at “its etymological root, the Latin appropriare, ‘to make one’s own’ ” (ibid). Being at home in the world requires this process of journey to make place “one’s own”. Dovey explains that for “Heidegger (1962),
appropriation is a dialectic process through which we take aspects of our world into our being and are in turn taken by our world. It involves both a ‘caring’ for a place and a ‘taking’ of that place into our own being” (ibid). Therefore, our authentic place in the world is discovered “through our engagement with the world, our dwelling, embodying both caring and taking” (ibid). By reaching beyond the familiar home “we open ourselves to the world of things and places we bring them meaning, and at the same time these things and places lend meaning to our sense of identity” (ibid). Thus, appropriation requires action “through which we appropriate aspects of the world as anchors for self-identity. The dialectic of appropriation embodies the emergence of environmental meaning through interaction” (ibid).
Now we have come to understand that being at home in the world “rests on a dynamic dialectical relationship between home and the outside, on which people build their everyday geographical understanding of the world” (Terkenli, 1995, p. 328). Journey gives a new view of place whereby
“personally submerging oneself in new environments, associations, and experiences, a person gains new perspectives on and an enlightened understanding of home. Away from home, human horizons expand, and an individual may discover new aspects of the self that result in an inevitable reordering of the intimate world and a reevaluation of past, present, and future situations. In this dialectical relationship between home and nonhome, the farther from home, the better individuals will know their home on return. Home differs with each instance of return. A continuous process of synthesis between the home and the nonhome occurs, as parts of nonhome are embodied into home and as home is incorporated into new frameworks of understanding” (ibid).
Another way of understanding appropriation is through inhabiting which is “the essential feature of subjective life, is an act of transformation where space becomes place. Inhabiting is an act of incorporation; it is a situation of active, essential acquisition” (Seamon & Mugerauer, 1985, p. 202). Journey outside the home involves incorporation which “is the initiative of the active body, embracing and assimilating a certain sphere of foreign reality to its own body” (ibid). Therefore “incorporation is essentially the movement from the strange to the familiar. This commerce of strange and familiar” (ibid). Being at home is “carved out of the anonymous, the alien. Everything has been transmuted in the home; things have truly become annexed to our body, and incorporated” (ibid). This can be further applied to Jacobson (2010, p. 219) who argues that “although we are inherently intersubjective beings, we are not first or most originally ‘public’ beings. Rather, to become a public being, that is, a citizen— in other words, to act as an independent and self-controlled agent in a community of similarly independent and self-controlled agents
G ildersleeve and C rowden
and, specifically, to do so in a shared space in the public arena— is something that we can successfully do only by emerging from our familiar, personal territories— our homes”. In other words, we must venture from the security of being at home to the insecurity of not being at home to truly find our place in the world as “public” beings.
Finally, we can relate this to a deeper understanding of the self. Some authors have stated the “ego” “as a structure particularly concerned with response and adaptation to a naturally changing environment. While they recognize that the primary state of the ego is equilibrium, growth is thought to occur through occasional challenges to that equilibrium, which results in a ‘recombination’ of the ego” (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 2014, p. 59). This is important to highlight because it “is quite a different emphasis from traditional personality theories which describe the ego’s main function as a protector and maintainer of its component processes. Smith (1968) makes a similar distinction between the relatively stable ‘self-concept’, and the more adaptive, malleable self-evaluations which result from regular transactions with the environment” (ibid). What this means for being at home in the world by being authentic to place is “that in addition to protecting one’s beliefs and experiences, individuals must retain the willingness to revise them in order to stay connected with the real world. The common theme among these theorists which is important to our conceptions of self- and place-identity is the notion that the psychologically healthy state of a person’s sense of self is not a static one, rather it is characterized by growth and change in response to a changing physical and social world” (ibid). A variety of chapters in this book will discuss this in more detail including Luca Valera who distinguishes the ego from ecological self and Ricardo Carli’s discussion of the “flourishing self”.
Power and Place
A number of authors have discussed the “the significance of power relationships for our understanding of place” (Cummins et al., 2007). This is important because each individual place in the world is structured by power. For example, “areas are delineated administratively, the distribution of services, infrastructure and linkages among places and the ways that places are represented are not seen as socially and politically neutral but as the outcome of dynamic social relations and power struggles between groups in society” (ibid). In particular, norms and rules are an important form of power that structures place and is discussed by Hudson who says “spaces, flows and circuits are socially constructed, temporarily stabilized in time/space by the
social glue of norms and rules, and both enable and constrain different forms of behaviour” (ibid).
This enabling and constraining of behavior of norms and rules lead to processes of exclusion. Cresswell (2014) explains the “mapping of particular meanings, practices, and identities on to place, ….leads to the construction of normative places where it is possible to be either ‘in place’ or ‘out of place’ ”. Matthew Gildersleeve’s chapter in this book (Chapter 5) deals with the problem of constraining behaviors through what is considered “normal” and excluding whatever is “out of place”. He argues that it is important to transgress these normative constraints for an individual to live authentically and be at home in the world. If this was not to occur the individual is expected to experience being not at home in the world and alienated from their authentic place or self.
Transgression of normative constraints involves going beyond “invisible boundaries that defi ne what is appropriate and what is inappropriate” (Cresswell, 2014, p. 5). However, these “unspoken rules exist in the world of commonsense. It is this very commonsense nature of place-based norms that make them so powerful an ideological tool” (ibid). Therefore, one important argument we make in this book is that normative values should be “constantly contested, transgressed, and resisted by the excluded” and this is possible because whatever values “are constructed they are never truly fi nished and always open to question and transformation” (ibid).
An important philosopher to discuss to understand this more is Foucault who “argues that modern society, lacking a centralized monarchical power, requires a more diffuse way of controlling its members and that this leads to the development of various surveillance and disciplinary schemas that can be rooted in a state’s citizens rather than in a central agent” (Jacobson, 2010, p. 236). Jacobson explains that Foucault identifies “Bentham’s Panopticon— an architectural structure conceived for use in prisons, reformatories, hospitals, and schools— as a model by which social norms have been enforced in modern society” (ibid).
We can understand how norms constrain behavior through the example of the Panopticon where “inmates (or inhabitants, as the case may be) are habituated to socially and physically acceptable forms of activity by means of regularized work and bodily maintenance schedules, and they are habituated to these activities specifically while under the constant view of others ” (ibid). The Panopticon which reflects normative societies creates habituation “not only to the activities of work, bodily discipline, etc., but also to the sense that one is always being watched and examined by the surrounding community— no matter what position you may hold in that community” (ibid).
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TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER,
ADA AMANDA FITCH VAN VECHTEN
"'Tingling is the test,' said Babbalanja, 'Yoomy, did you tingle, when that song was composing?'
"'All over, Babbalanja.'"
H M : Mardi.
"We work in the dark—we do what we can— we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
D : The Middle Years.
"Les existences les plus belles sont peut-être celles qui ont subi tous les extrêmes, qui ont traversé toutes les températures, rencontré toutes les sensations excessives et tous les sentiments contradictoires."
R G : Le Chat de Misère.
"The man who satisfies a ceaseless intellectual curiosity probably squeezes more out of life in the long run than any one else."
E G : Books on the Table.
"O mother of the hills, forgive our towers; O mother of the clouds, forgive our dreams."
E E
Preface
So few people were acquainted with Peter Whiffle that the announcement, on that page of the New York Times consecrated to wedding, birth, and obituary notices, of his death in New York on December 15, 1919, awakened no comment. Those of my friends who knew something of the relationship between Peter and myself, probably did not see the slender paragraph at all. At any rate none of them mentioned it, save, of course, Edith Dale, whose interest, in a sense, was as special as my own. Her loss was not so personal, however, nor her grief so deep. It was strange and curious to remember that however infrequently we had met, and the chronicle which follows will give evidence of the comparative infrequency of these meetings, yet some indestructible bond, a firm determining girdle of intimate understanding, over which Time and Space had no power, held us together. I had become to Peter something of a necessity, in that through me he found the proper outlet for his artistic explosions. I was present, indeed, at the bombing of more than one discarded theory. It was under the spell of such apparently trivial and external matters that our friendship developed and, while my own interests often flew in other directions, Peter certainly occupied as important a place in my heart as I did in his, probably, in some respects, more important. Nevertheless, when I received a notification from his lawyer that I had been mentioned in Peter's will, I was considerably astonished. My astonishment increased when I was informed of the nature of the bequest. Peter Whiffle had appointed me to serve as his literary executor.
Now Peter Whiffle was not, in any accepted sense of the epithet, an author. He had never published a book; he had never, indeed, written a book. In the end he had come to hold a somewhat mystic theory in regard to such matters, which he had only explained to me a few moments before he died. I was, however, aware, more aware than any one else could possibly have been, that from time to time
he had been accustomed to take notes. I was as familiar, I suppose, as any one could be, with the trend of his later ideas, and with some of the major incidents in his earlier life he had acquainted me, although, here, I must confess, there were lacunæ in my knowledge. Still, his testamentary request, unless I might choose to accept it in a sense, I am convinced, entirely too flattering to my slender talents, seemed to be inconsistent with the speculative idea which haunted him, at least towards the end of his life. This contradiction and an enlarging sense of the mysterious character of the assignment were somewhat dispelled by a letter, dated June 17, 1917, which, a few days after the reading of the will, his lawyer placed in my hands and which indicated plainly enough that Peter had decided upon my appointment at least two years and a half before he died. This letter not only confirmed the strange clause in the will but also, to some extent, explained it and, as the letter is an essential part of my narrative, I offer it in evidence at once.
Dear Carl—so it read:
I suppose that some day I shall die; people do die. If there has been one set purpose in my life, it has been not to have a purpose. That, you alone, perhaps, understand. You know how I have always hesitated to express myself definitely, you know how I have refrained from writing, and you also know, perhaps, that I can write; indeed, until recently, you thought I was writing, or would write. But I think you realize now what writing has come to mean to me, definition, constant definition, although it is as apparent as anything can be that life, nature, art, whatever one writes about, are fluid and mutable things, perpetually undergoing change and, even when they assume some semblance of permanence, always presenting two or more faces. There are those who are not appalled by these conditions, those who confront them with bravery and even with impertinence. You have been courageous. You have published several books which I have read with varying shades of pleasure, and you have not hesitated to define, or at any rate discuss, even that intangible, invisible, and noisy art called Music.
I have begun many things but nothing have I ever completed. It has always seemed unnecessary or impossible, although at times I have
tried to carry a piece of work through. On these occasions a restraining angel has held me firmly back. It might be better if what I have written, what I have said, were permitted to pass into oblivion with me, to become a part of scoriac chaos. It may not mean anything in particular; if it means too much, to that extent I have failed.
Thinking, however, of death, as I sometimes do, I have wondered if, after all, behind the vapoury curtain of my fluctuating purpose, behind the orphic wall of my indecision, there did not lurk some vague shadow of intention. Not on my part, perhaps, but on the part of that being, or that condition, which is reported to be interested in such matters. This doubt, I confess, I owe to you. Sometimes, in those extraordinary moments between sleeping and awakening— and once in the dentist's chair, after I had taken gas—the knots seemed to unravel, the problem seemed as naked as Istar at the seventh gate. But these moments are difficult, or impossible, to recapture. To recapture them I should have been compelled to invent a new style, a style as capricious and vibratory as the moments themselves. In this, however, as you know, I have failed, while you have succeeded. It is to your success, modest as it may appear to you, that I turn in my dilemma. To come to the point, cannot you explain, make out some kind of case for me, put me on my feet (or in a book), and thereby prove or disprove something? Shameless as I am, it would be inconceivable, absurd, for me to ask you to do this while I am yet living and I have, therefore, put my request into a formal clause in my will. After I am dead, you may search your memory, which I know to be very good, for such examples of our conversations as will best be fitted to illuminate your subject, which I must insist—you, yourself, will understand this, too, sooner or later— is not me at all.
When your book is published, I shall be dead and perhaps unconscious. If, however, as I strongly suspect, some current connects the life to be with the life that is, I can enjoy what you have done. At the best, you may give others a slight intimation of the meaning of inspiration or furnish guideposts, lighthouses, and bellbuoys to the poet who intends to march singing along the highroad
or bravely to embark on the ships at sea; at the worst, I have furnished you with a subject for another book, and I am well aware that subjects even for bad books are difficult to light upon.
Salve atque Vale,
Peter.
This letter, I may say, astonished me. I think it would astonish anybody. A profound and enveloping melancholy succeeded to this feeling of astonishment. At the time, I was engaged in putting the finishing touches to The Tiger in the House and I postponed meditation on Peter's affair until that bulky volume could be dispatched to the printer. That happy event fell on March 15, 1920, but my anthology, Lords of The Housetops, next claimed my attention, and then the new edition of Interpreters, for which I had agreed to furnish a new paper, and the writing of this new paper amused me very much, carrying my mind not only far away from cats, which had been occupying it for a twelvemonth, but also away from Peter's request. At last, Interpreters was ready for the printer, but now the proofs of The Tiger began to come in, and I may say that for the next three months my days were fully occupied in the correction of proofs, for those of Lords of The Housetops and Interpreters were in my garret when the proofs of The Tiger were not. Never have I corrected proofs with so much concentrated attention as that which I devoted to the proofs of The Tiger, and yet there were errors. In regard to some of these, I was not the collaborator. On Page 240, for instance, one may read, There are many females in the novels of Emile Zola. My intention was to have the fourth word read, felines, and so it stood in the final proof, but my ambition to surmount the initial letter of Zola's Christian name with an acute accent (an ambition I shall forswear on this present page), compelled the printer to reset the line, so that subsequently, when I opened the book at this page, I read with amazement that there are many females in the novels of Emile Zola, a statement that cannot be readily denied, to be sure, but still it is no discovery of which to boast.
It was not until September, 1920, that I had an opportunity to seriously consider Peter's request and when I did begin to consider it, I thought of it at first only as a duty to be accomplished. But when I began searching my memory for details of the conversations between us and had perused certain notes I had made on various occasions, visited his house on Beekman Place to look over his effects and talk with his mother, the feeling of the artist for inevitable material came over me and I knew that whether Peter had written me that letter or not, I should sooner or later have written this book about him.
There was another struggle over the eventual form, a question concerning which Peter had made no suggestions. It seemed to me, at first, that a sort of haphazard collection of his ideas and pronunciamentos, somewhat in the manner of Samuel Butler's NoteBooks, would meet the case, but after a little reflection I rejected this idea. Light on the man was needed for a complete understanding of his ideas, or lack of them, for they shifted like the waves of the sea. I can never tell why, but it was while I was reading William Dean Howells's Familiar Spanish Studies one day in the New York Public Library that I suddenly decided on a sort of loose biographical form, a free fantasia in the manner of a Liszt Rhapsody. This settled, I literally swam ahead and scarcely found it necessary to examine many papers (which was fortunate as few exist) or to consult anything but my memory, which lighted up the subject from obscure angles, as a search-light illuminates the spaces of the sea, once I had learned to decipher the meaning of the problem. What it is all about, or whether it is about anything at all, you, the reader, of course, must decide for yourself. To me, the moral, if I may use a conventional word to express an unconventional idea, is plain, and if I have not succeeded in making it appear so, then I must to some extent blame you, the reader, for what is true of all books, is perhaps truest of this, that you will carry away from it only what you are able to bring to it.
Chapter I
One of my friends, a lady, visited Venice alone in her middle age. It was late at night when the train drew into the station, and it was raining, a drizzly, chilling rain. The porter pushed her, with her bag, into a damp gondola and the dismal voyage to the hotel began. There were a few lights here and there but she had the impression that she was floating down the Chicago River in a wash-tub. Once she had reached her destination, she clambered unsteadily out of the black barge, wobbled through a dark passageway, inhaling great whiffs of masticated garlic, and finally emerged in a dimly lighted lobby. At the desk, a sleepy clerk yawned as she spoke of her reservation. Tired, rather cross, and wholly disappointed, she muttered, I don't like Venice at all. I wish I hadn't come. The clerk was unsympathetically explanatory, Signora should have visited Venice when she was younger.
A day or so later, the lady recovered her spirits and even her sense of humour for she told me the story herself and I have always remembered it. The moment it passed her lips, indeed, I began to reflect that I had been lucky to encounter the Bride of the Adriatic in my youth. Paris, too, especially Paris, for there is a melancholy pleasure to be derived from Venice. It is a suitable environment for grief; there is a certain superior relish to suffering there. Paris, I sometimes think, smiles only on the very young and it is not a city I should care to approach for the first time after I had passed forty.
I was, as a matter of fact, in my twenties when I first went to Paris— my happiness might have been even greater had I been nineteen— and I was alone. The trip across England—I had landed at Liverpool —and the horrid channel, I will not describe, although both made sufficient impression on me, but the French houses at Dieppe awakened my first deep emotion and then, and so many times since, the Normandy cider, quaffed in a little café, conterminous to the railroad, and the journey through France, alive in the sunlight, for it
was May, the fields dancing with the green grain spattered with vermilion poppies and cerulean cornflowers, the white roads, flying like ribbons between the stately poplars, leading away over the charming hills past the red-brick villas, completed the siege of my not too easily given heart. There was the stately and romantic interruption of Rouen, which at that period suggested nothing in the world to me but Emma Bovary. Then more fields, more roads, more towns, and at last, towards twilight, Paris.
Railroads have a fancy for entering cities stealthily through backyards and the first glimpses of Paris, achieved from a carwindow, were not over-pleasant but the posters on the hoardings, advertising beer and automobile tires, particularly that of the Michelin Tire Company, with the picture of the pinguid gentleman, constructed of a series of pneumatic circles, seemed characteristic enough. Chéret was dead but something of his spirit seemed to glow in these intensely coloured affiches and I was young. Even the dank Gare Saint Lazare did not dismay me, and I entered into the novel baggage hunt with something of zest, while other busy passengers and the blue porters rushed hither and thither in a complicated but well-ordered maze. Naturally, however, I was the last to leave the station; as the light outside deepened to a rich warm blue, I wandered into the street, my porter bearing my trunk, to find there a solitary cocher mounted on the box of his carious fiacre.
An artist friend, Albert Worcester, had already determined my destination and so I gave commands, Hotel de la Place de l'Odéon, the cocher cracked his whip, probably adding a Hue cocotte! and we were under way. The drive through the streets that evening seemed like a dream and, even later, when the streets of Paris had become more familiar to me than those of any other city, I could occasionally recapture the mood of this first vision. For Paris in the May twilight is very soft and exquisite, the grey buildings swathed in a bland blue light and the air redolent with a strange fragrance, the ingredients of which have never been satisfactorily identified in my nasal imagination, although Huysmans, Zola, Symons, and Cunninghame Graham have all attempted to separate and describe them. Presently we crossed the boulevards and I saw for the first time the
rows of blooming chestnut trees, the kiosques where newsdealers dispensed their wares, the brilliantly lighted theatres, the sidewalk cafés, sprinkled with human figures, typical enough, doubtless, but who all seemed as unreal to me at the time as if they had been Brobdingnags, Centaurs, Griffins, or Mermaids. Other fiacres, private carriages, taxi-autos, carrying French men and French ladies, passed us. I saw Bel Ami, Nana, Liane de Pougy, or Otero in every one of them. As we drove by the Opéra, I am certain that Cléo de Mérode and Leopold of Belgium descended the steps. Even the buses assumed the appearance of gorgeous chariots, bearing perfumed Watteauesque ladies on their journey to Cythera. As we drove through the Tuileries Gardens, the mood snapped for an instant as I viewed the statue of Gambetta, which, I thought at the time, and have always thought since, was amazingly like the portrait of a gentleman hailing a cab. What could more completely symbolize Paris than the statue of a gentleman perpetually hailing a cab and never getting one?
We drove on through the Louvre and now the Seine was under us, lying black in the twilight, reviving dark memories of crime and murder, on across the Pont du Carrousel, and up the narrow Rue de Seine. The Quartier Latin! I must have cried aloud, for the cocher looked a trifle suspicious, his head turned the fraction of an inch. Later, of course, I said, the left bank, as casually as any one. It was almost dark when we drove into the open Place, flanked by the Odéon, a great Roman temple, with my little hotel tucked into one corner, as unostentatiously as possible, being exactly similar to every other structure, save the central one, in the Place. I shall stop tonight, I said to myself, in the hotel where Little Billee lived, for, when one first goes to Paris when one is young, Paris is either the Paris of Murger, du Maurier, or the George Moore of the Confessions, perhaps the Paris of all three. In my bag these three books lay, and I had already begun to live one of them.
The patron and a servant in a long white apron were waiting, standing in the doorway. The servant hoisted my trunk to his shoulder and bore it away. I paid the cocher's reckoning, not without difficulty for, although I was not ignorant of the language, I was
unaccustomed to the simplicity of French coinage. There were also the mysteries of the pourboire to compute—ten per cent, I had been told; who has not been told this?—and besides, as always happens when one is travelling, I had no little money. But at length the negotiations were terminated, not to the displeasure of the cocher, I feel certain, since he condescended to smile pleasantly. Then, with a crack of his whip, this enormous fellow with his black moustaches, his glazed top-hat, and his long coat, drove away. I cast a long lingering look after him, apparently quite unaware that many another such teratological specimen existed on every hand. Now I followed the patron into a dark hallway and new strata of delight. He gave me a lighted candle and, behind him, I mounted the winding stairway to the first floor, where I was deposited in a chamber with dark red walls, heavy dark red curtains at the windows, which looked out over the Place, a black walnut wash-hand-stand with pitcher and basin, a huge black walnut wardrobe, two or three chairs of the same wood, upholstered with faded brocade, and a most luxurious bed, so high from the floor that one had to climb into it, hung with curtains like those at the window, and surmounted by a feather-bed. There was also another article of furniture, indispensable to any French bedroom.
I gave Joseph (all men servants in small hotels in Paris are named Joseph, perhaps to warn off prospective Potiphar's wives) his vail, asked for hot water, which he bore up promptly in a small can, washed myself, did a little unpacking, humming the Mattchiche the while, changed my shirt, my collar and my necktie, demanded another bougie, lighted it, and under the humble illumination afforded by it and its companion, I began to read again The Confessions of a Young Man. It was not very long before I was interrupted in the midst of an absorbing passage descriptive of the circle at the Nouvelle Athènes by the arrival of Albert Worcester, who had arranged for my reception, and right here I may say that I was lodged in the Hotel de la Place de l'Odéon for fifty francs a month. Albert's arrival, although unannounced, was not unexpected, as he had promised to take me to dinner
I was sufficiently emphatic. Paris! I cried. Paris! Good God!
I see you are not disappointed. But Albert permitted a trace of cynicism to flavour his smile.
It's too perfect, too wonderful. It is more than I felt or imagined. I'm moving in.
But you haven't seen it....
I've seen enough. I don't mean that. I mean I've seen enough to know But I want to see it all, everything, Saint Sulpice, the FoliesBergère, the Musée de Cluny, the Nouvelle Athènes, the Comédie Française, the Bal Bullier, the Arc de Triomphe, the Luxembourg Gardens....
They close at sundown. My expression was the cue for him to continue, They'll be open tomorrow and any other day. They're just around the corner. You can go there when you get up in the morning, if you do get up in the morning. But what do you want to do tonight?
Anything! Everything! I cried.
Well, we'll eat first.
So we blew out the candles, floated down the dark stairs—I didn't really walk for a week, I am sure—, brushing on our way against a bearded student and a girl, fragrant and warm in the semi-blackness, out into the delicious night, with the fascinating indescribable odour of Paris, which ran the gamut from the fragrance of lilac and mimosa to the aroma of horse-dung; with the sound of horses' hoofs and rolling wheels beating and revolving on the cobble-stones, we made our way—I swear my feet never touched the ground—through the narrow, crooked, constantly turning, bewildering streets, until we came out on a broad boulevard before the Café d'Harcourt, where I was to eat my first Paris dinner.
The Café d'Harcourt is situated near the Church of the Sorbonne on the Boulevard Saint Michel, which you are more accustomed to see spelled Boul' Mich'. It is a big, brightly lighted café, with a broad terrasse, partially enclosed by a hedge of green bushes in boxes. The hands of the clock pointed to the hour of eight when we arrived and the tables all appeared to be occupied. Inside, groups of men were engaged in games of checkers, while the orchestra was
