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The Commonplace Book

Short quotations (relevant to more than a single place) that can stimulate the imagination and pique the intellect.  Either short references (name, title, page number) to items in the Bibliography, or full references.  Latest entries first in list.

"The problem is to understand these strange relationships which are woven between the parts of the landscape, or between it and me as an incarnate subject, and through which an object perceived can concentrate in itself a whole scene or become the image of a whole segment of life." (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, quoted in Casey, Representing Place, p. xiii)

"'Nation' as a term is radically connected with 'native'.  We are born into relationships which are typically settled in a place.  This form of primary and 'placeable' bonding is of quite fundamental human and natural importance.  Yet the jump from that to anything like the modern nation-state is entirely artificial." (Raymond Williams, The Year 2000, New York: Pantheon, 1983)

"Speech leaves no mark in space; like gesture it exists in its immediate context and can reappear only in another’s voice, another’s body, even if that other is the same speaker transformed by history. But writing contaminates; writing leaves its trace, a trace beyond the life of the body. Thus, while speech gains authenticity, writing promises immortality, or at least the immortality of the material world in contrast to the mortality of the body. […] Writing gives us a device for inscribing space, for inscribing nature: the lovers names carved in bark, the slogans on the bridge, and the strangely uniform and idiosyncratic hand that has tattooed the subways. Writing serves to capture the world, defining and commenting upon the configurations we choose to textualize." (Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, p. 31)

Relph defines "existential insideness" as a "form of insideness […] in which a place is experienced without deliberate and selfconscious reflection yet is full with significances". (E. Relph, Place and Placelessness, London: Pion, 1976, p. 55)

When President Grant attempted to annex Santo Domingo in 1869, for Carl Schurz the question was "whether we shall incorporate the American Tropics in our political system" (quoted in Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists 1898-1900, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968, p. 22)

"A place is defined by its boundaries, its intrinsic limits, its distinctly local 'here' that remains fixed in space even as it perdures in time...  Places do not occur naturally but are created by human beings through some mark or sign of human presence.  A wilderness in itself is placeless, for it has no human center or point of convergence around which nature can gather and become bounded." (Robert Pogue Harrison, "Hic Jacet", in Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, p. 350)

"Just as staying in place corresponds to position, and moving the whole body within one locus answers to place proper, so moving between places corresponds to an entire region, that is, an area concatenated by peregrinations between the places it connects." (Casey, "How to Get from", p. 24)

"The main obstacles to any global study of the Caribbean's societies, insular or continental, are exactly those things that scholars usually adduce to define the area: its fragmentation; its instability; its reciprocal isolation; its uprootedness; its cultural heterogeneity; its lack of historiography and historical continuity; its contingency and impermanence; its syncretism." (Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, p. 1)

"The history in places, especially in places of cross-cultural encounters, will take as much imagination as science to see.  Blood and ashes are blown away with the dirt.  Shouts and songs die on the wind.  Pain and happiness are as evanescent as memory.  To catch the lost passions in places, history will have to be a little more artful than being a 'non-fiction'.  It will have to have, among other graces, a trust in and a sense of the continuities of living through different times, despite all the transformations and translations that masquerade as discontinuities." (Dening, Beach Crossings, p. 66)

"Every love has its landscape.  This place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you're present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion.  The places inside matter as much as the ones outside." (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006, p. 118)

"The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning." (Jacques Lacan, "Of structure as an inmixing of an Otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever", in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato, Baltimore: JHUP, 1972, p. 189)

"Gathering gives to place its peculiar perduringness, allowing us to return to it again and again as the same place and not just as the same position or site.  For a place, in its dynamism, does not age in a systematically changing way, that is, in accordance with a preestablished schedule of growth and decline; only its tenants and visitors, enactors and witnesses age and grow old in this way.  A place is generative and regenerative on its own schedule.  From it experiences are born and to it human beings (and other organisms) return for empowerment, much like Antaeus touching the earth for renewed strength.  Place is the generatrix for the collection, as well as the recollection, of all that occurs in the lives of sentient beings, and even for the trajectories of inanimate things.  Its power consists in gathering these lives and things, each with its own space and time, into one arena of common engagement."  (Casey, "How to Get from", p. 26)

“Each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.” (Tuan, Space and Place, p. 6)

"Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography.  That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings."  (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus, 1993, p. 6)

"The surveyor straightens from his theodolite.
'Spirit-level,' he scrawls, and instantly
the ciphers staggering down their columns
are soldier ants, their panicradiating in the shadow
of a new god arriving over Aztec anthills.

The sun has sucked his brain pith-dry.
His vision whirls with dervishes, he is dust.
Like an archaic photographer, hooded in shade,
he crouches, screwing a continent to his eye."

(Derek Walcott, from "Guyana" [1969], in Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986, p. 115)