A Sense of Place: Finding Meaning in the Spaces We Inhabit

reflections

Andrew Peterson doesn’t seem to like St. Lewis very much. If you’ve read much of Andrew Peterson’s books or listened to many of his songs, you know he is an artist prone to loving deeply—and that’s why it’s strange that, in his book The God of the Garden, he writes about St. Lewis with distain. He sees in St. Lewis the same buildings he sees in every American metropolis: Best Buy, Walmart, TJMaxx, and so on. Who could tell one city from another if he were dropped in the middle with no context or map? All the history, the fun stuff, the real bits of America are buried under parking lots. Peterson thinks this means modern man has lost his “sense of place,” and in one way, I have to agree.

I’ve just spent a term studying abroad in Oxford, England, and my favorite memories there are taking detours on my walk home. If I wandered off my regular path, I was always bound to find a corner, a lump, a lamp post, or a cafe that held a sort of magic. It wasn’t magical because it was old, although it often was, and that was always nice. It wasn’t magical because it was made with astounding skill or beauty, although Oxford hardly lacks in those respects. No, the backstreets and byways of Oxford are wonderful to me because they are so content in themselves. Each bit is like nothing else in the world—literally. Every crook and cranny could be a painting, it seems, because you will never find it in another place. It is what it is, and it is nothing else. It wouldn’t even fit across the street, which is why I loved so much to find new ways to walk home. It’s also why I loved to take the same path time and again. If I grew to love that walk across Folly Bridge, as I did, then I was loving something real. I was sharing something real with the crowds of people who crossed it back and forth every day, and I was loving something that was uniquely mine in that moment. It’s strange that, as I crossed it, I wondered what famous feet from history had trod where my sneakers now hit the cracked concrete—but I never once wondered whether some other person just like me were crossing a nearly identical bridge in a nearly identical city. Preposterous thought! Oxford is a real place in a way that St. Lewis (at least as Peterson paints it) will never be.

But it is not fair to say that the architects of St. Lewis, those who so scandalously copied the blueprints from Indianapolis or Cincinnati or some other city—it is not fair to say that they had no sense of place. They had a very exact sense of place, more exact than any architect in Oxford. They looked at the hill or the field or the sloping river bank, and they knew exactly what they wanted. They knew it down to the typeface on the big white sign they would put beside the four lane road they’d build past it. They wanted a Best Buy. Or a Walmart. Or a TJMaxx. Then they built it, and the populous agreed. Most people in St. Lewis buy their wheat bread and flip-flops and bath-towel-racks at a chain store, and they’re satisfied with the quality and the price. They have their places, and they like them. They know, as they push their squeaking carts, that they are in a mega-store, and they don’t mind it in the least. They have a sense of place. But there is some difference between a “place” like Walmart, that stretches across a world of identical city blocks, and a place like Folly Bridge, that stretches in one spot back through centuries.

I spent the last week on a cruse ship fifteen stories tall. It was extremely hard to find a place on the ship with both sunlight and silence. I wanted to write the next few thousand words of my novel and read The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but for the first several days, the only spaces I found were the target of such a bombardment of color and sound. Such loud music; such dots and swooshes on every surface—even cheetahs in tessellating patterns across the red and green carpet!

If I were to judge based on the few days and few people I saw—just from a distance, as I barely talked to anyone—then I would say that the cruse ship was the TJMaxx of travel. I have been on one cruse before, and it was on a completely different continent with a different cruse line—and you would have found it quite easy to convince me that this was the exact ship I’d visited before. Just as the shoppers in a TJMaxx know what they want on the strip down the street, so the vacationers on this cruse knew exactly what they wanted in their vacation experience. They wanted waiters who dance after dinner on Thursday. They wanted pretty people to sing crowd favorites under flashing lights from seven forty-five to eight thirty. They wanted a four hour foray on the type of tourist experience that, according to the tour guide, is extremely authentic. The two cruses I’ve been on were both places built to give people exactly what they want: in short, they wanted to sit every day on deck six (or deck five or thirteen or seven or fifteen) and be incessantly entertained. (There is an insight in the passivity of that verb: to be entertained. It’s impossible to describe the experience in the active voice.)

I told my dad that the cruse offered nothing which was meant to be remembered (aside from being with family, of course, which isn’t really the ship’s offering). He protested that some people had cultivated a taste for exactly this type of experience, and people usually remember distinctly what they cultivate a taste for. But that’s not what I meant. That type of memory serves a cruse-goer in exactly two ways: first, the memory of pleasure has some continuing pleasure in itself, and second, it is a pretty reliable map to finding more pleasure in the future. But there is something so different in my memory of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That is the type of story that I will turn in my mind for years to come. It is the type of story that will change what I say to my friends when I’m old—change it for the better, hopefully, not just supply me a diverting story for chasing away the silence. That’s a different type of memory.

And then, there’s my memory of Folly Bridge. It does, in a way, offer continued pleasure and indicate to me where to find that pleasure in the future. I would love to go back to Oxford. But for one thing, that is a an active pleasure which I am reviving and sustaining, not a passive one. I had to pay attention on that bridge to reap the benefits of knowing it and loving it. And for another thing, my memory of Folly Bridge is now a part of who I am, more than the evening cruse show with acrobats and disco-flamenco dancers ever could hope to be. My experience walking over that bridge twice a day for three months was an improving pleasure—it shaped me, and shaped me for the better. It trained me and wore a groove of thought and opinion into me, just as much as those jagged flagstones wore scrapes into my shoes.

I don’t think that the modern man has lost his sense of place. I don’t think that people on curses have lost their appetite for life. But on the whole, we have an appetite for a shallow life of entertainment. Usually, I laugh at the doomsayers who warn that we’re all screen-locked on Wall-E’s spaceship, skimming the surface, amused to death. In many ways, I am convinced that people today are just the same as all the people who have lived before, and we are no closer to judgement now than we would be if we all read paper books and ate home-grown tomatoes. Still, I’m sorry that we’ve gotten so good at getting what we want. If we had to work a little harder, maybe we’d put a little more thought into the options. We might read the fine print, and we might realize that a little blood and sweat’s actually quite energizing, and that calloused feet rest better by an evening fire.

I did enjoy the cruse, though, and I have a growing affection for Houston, my American city, stuck with strip-malls as it is. This is why I have not completely despaired of modernity as I might be after a description like Peterson’s. I was in Oxford long enough to know that pretty spaces and “real places” can disappear under the film of familiarity, too. It is possible to cross folly bridge with as little a “sense of place” as a woman pushing her cart past the pre-packaged crackers in Walmart. Oxford simply looks better in the soft light of novelty, while places like Houston and St. Lewis need time and familiarity to bring out their character. I may not be able to tell most American cities apart if I were dropped in the middle with no context or map, but I would recognize Houston. I know what the strip malls look like in my town. I know how the curbs are scratched in my neighborhood, and I know how the air feels hot and heavy in the parking lot outside my Walmart. It is possible to relish a place—any place—even a place that caters to a base appetite. With patience, you can drink deeply at a shallow well.

With patience, you can drink deeply at a shallow well.