Niharika’s Reviews > A Sense of Place > Status Update

Some are born in their place, some find it, some
realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.

He
conducts his literary explorations inward, toward the core of what supports him physically and
spiritually. He belongs to an honorable tradition, one that even in America includes some great
names: Thoreau, Burroughs, Frost, Faulkner, Steinbeck – lovers of known earth, known
weathers, and known neighbors both human and nonhuman. He calls himself a “placed” person.

I doubt that we will ever get the motion out of the Americans, for everything in his
culture of opportunity and abundance has, up to now, urged motion on him as a form of virtue.

2. He is talking about the knowledge of place that comes
from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving
its mornings or evenings or hot noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling
that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is
talking about the knowing that poets specialize in.

1.Back to Wendell Berry, and his belief that if you don’t know where you are you don’t
know who you are. He is not talking about the kind of location that can be determined by looking
at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the
memory, the history of a family or a tribe.

1.Indifferent to, or contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better, hooked on change, a lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it.