![]() Learning a place by heart is a luxury rarely afforded to adults, and unless absolutely forced to, one seldom even notices that the ability has been lost. This capacity for geographical familiarity-knowing exactly where the neighbor’s fence warps slightly-is a visceral kind of knowledge, gained organically, and it atrophies as we age. These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to souls-the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart standing between their father’s knees while he drove leisurely. ![]() She goes on to cite a list of beloved natural features: trees that lean in a certain way, abrupt slopes, a bald spot in a pasture. ![]() “Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood,” George Eliot writes. There’s a passage near the beginning of Middlemarch in which the narrator describes the view out of a carriage window that depicts, better than anything I’ve ever read, the pleasure of knowing a place intimately. Professional surfer Anthony Walsh, Teahupoo, Tahiti, April 2009 ![]() Josh Humbert/National Geographic Creative ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |