the spirit of place is a great lie

Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. [...]

There was a tremendous polarity in Italy, in the city of Rome. And this seems to have died. For even places die. The Island of Great Britain had a wonderful terrestrial magnetism or polarity of its own, which made the British people. For the moment, this polarity seems to be breaking. Can England die? And what if England dies?

Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps least free.

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when I they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obey- ing from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, Organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when we are escaping to some wild west.

--D.H. Lawrence, 'The Spirit of the Place' in Studies in Classic American Literature.

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O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

--W.B. Yeats, 'A Prayer for my Daughter'



I have often thought, especially over these past three years after I moved to Japan, how alien this nationalistic sense of place is to me. And it is perhaps because I have never been one to feel 'rooted in one dear perpetual place' that I have spent so much time studying artistic expressions of this rootedness, its illusions and pitfalls. While the experience has been rewarding in so many ways, it has also drawn me to the work of artists who have developed a radically different sense of place, artists who are cautious about or sceptical of national and communal allegiances because their sense of place relates to larger geographical or geological realities, or, most importantly, to much smaller ones - anonymous, non-descript small places that touch the heart unexpected ways.

Some might see here a survival strategy to cope with personal circumstances and hardships - forced nomadism, rootlessness, whatever - but I prefer to envisage it as an alternative sense of home. As I wrote a while ago, a sense of home that allows you to find roots wherever you are, in places where you were not born and did not live for long (or did not live at all), because you carry your sense of home around with you, and it overflows, emanates from you whenever some thing, some place, some person sparks it to life and you respond.

Finding a place for yourself in the world, or between worlds: developing an attentiveness to the unexpected, the unplanned, the improbable - and being at once patient and unafraid to respond.

That's the prayer I'd send up for my ever-moving daughter. May you feel at home everywhere you are and go, sweetheart.