Quotations from: For the Beauty of the Earth, etc
I've been mulling over the concept of Place for quite some time now. It's one of those things that stay in your mind and won't get out, no matter where you go, what you do, or even who you become, much like first love, or some equally irrational obsession to which you're drawn like a moth to lamp.
I don't stay in places for long.
From childhood home in a Hakka town, the city Guangzhou, university campus in North Georgia, then Upstate New York, western frontier Urumqi, home again, now Florida, and on to Japan. I'm 21. I've been restless. Yet undeniably attached to every single one of these places I just listed. They aren't cataloging, some tourist's boast of how well-traveled she is, it's not like that at all. Not pride, only ... nostalgia? or have I only been left with loneliness? A piece of me, maybe my soul, have been left there, and I remember, even in my dreams, waking and real, what Dr. Ziemann said when we met to talk about his Myrivilis translations and living in Greece: "You'll always be homesick."
It's kind of like that. The chic thing to say now is "global citizen," which makes you sound modern and intelligent, and which we all want to be I'm sure. I'm not the kind to list accolades, to flaunt where I've been and lived as some sort of testimony to how cool I am. People don't know that once you've been somewhere, lived there, you're never the same. The landscape haunts you. Bits of it comes intertwining in the night air and waft into the unconscious: the Hakka stone balcony with bougainvillea raging the fragility of magenta... Guangzhou's deep dark Pearl River whose banks are lined with silently swaying willows against the traffic lights over the not-so-distant bridge... the ridiculously glorious golden of Gingko leaves fluttering against brick walls of the found-in-1875 campus... those deceptively simple, but truly ethereal, cornfields that burst into blossom after the snows have melted... Urumqi's winter air that freezes your breath into white on strands of hair... monsoon rains... alligators... Tokyo's maple.... Sometimes it hurts to think like this. Ortega, now I've told you all the landscapes in which I've lived, can you tell me who I am?
Everywhere I've been, I've searched for home. The void inside is ever displaced with this place or that, and every single time I'm on the bus, the train, the plane, I never know if I'll ever be back. So I carry all of them with, these places with endearing scenes, their flowers, winds, rocks, waters--and so I've come to love this place, this place that is I.
"Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are." - Ortega y Gasset
"An individual is not distinct from his place; he is that place." - Gabriel Marcel
"Settle down, get to know your place, and dig in." - Gary Snyder
I've been mulling over the concept of Place for quite some time now. It's one of those things that stay in your mind and won't get out, no matter where you go, what you do, or even who you become, much like first love, or some equally irrational obsession to which you're drawn like a moth to lamp.
I don't stay in places for long.
From childhood home in a Hakka town, the city Guangzhou, university campus in North Georgia, then Upstate New York, western frontier Urumqi, home again, now Florida, and on to Japan. I'm 21. I've been restless. Yet undeniably attached to every single one of these places I just listed. They aren't cataloging, some tourist's boast of how well-traveled she is, it's not like that at all. Not pride, only ... nostalgia? or have I only been left with loneliness? A piece of me, maybe my soul, have been left there, and I remember, even in my dreams, waking and real, what Dr. Ziemann said when we met to talk about his Myrivilis translations and living in Greece: "You'll always be homesick."
It's kind of like that. The chic thing to say now is "global citizen," which makes you sound modern and intelligent, and which we all want to be I'm sure. I'm not the kind to list accolades, to flaunt where I've been and lived as some sort of testimony to how cool I am. People don't know that once you've been somewhere, lived there, you're never the same. The landscape haunts you. Bits of it comes intertwining in the night air and waft into the unconscious: the Hakka stone balcony with bougainvillea raging the fragility of magenta... Guangzhou's deep dark Pearl River whose banks are lined with silently swaying willows against the traffic lights over the not-so-distant bridge... the ridiculously glorious golden of Gingko leaves fluttering against brick walls of the found-in-1875 campus... those deceptively simple, but truly ethereal, cornfields that burst into blossom after the snows have melted... Urumqi's winter air that freezes your breath into white on strands of hair... monsoon rains... alligators... Tokyo's maple.... Sometimes it hurts to think like this. Ortega, now I've told you all the landscapes in which I've lived, can you tell me who I am?
Everywhere I've been, I've searched for home. The void inside is ever displaced with this place or that, and every single time I'm on the bus, the train, the plane, I never know if I'll ever be back. So I carry all of them with, these places with endearing scenes, their flowers, winds, rocks, waters--and so I've come to love this place, this place that is I.
"Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins."
---Rilke wrote in Book of Hours.
How to settle down, then? How to follow Master Gary Snyder's advice, then, to "dig in"? I have a vague thought that I might be on the road for some awhile, wandering almost like a vagabond, looking for something. He did it himself, and Master Basho, and countless young men and women who have left home for pursuit of a new life. Last night I began a J-dorama (Japanese drama), the first episode of which we're introduced to a man who resigned from his New York office to move back to his recently deceased wife's hometown, a small place in the nowheres of Hokkaido, and open, there, a cafe called Forest's Clock where customers know each other by name and hand-grind the beans themselves. He had worked abroad for the middle-age years away, away from wife and son, from his country, and when listening to one of his ex-coworkers recount the days he's spent with his wife, the total 15-year-marriage only yielding 5 years, not even that, of actually being together--the old man wept.
There is someone I love, waiting in one place. There are moments I wonder what in the world I'm doing here away from there.
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