Geography Iii

Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning exactitude and even more astonishing resonance. As John Ashbery has written, "The private self . . . melts imperceptibly into the large utterance, the grandeur of poetry, which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds ‘grand,' but is as quietly convincing as everyday speech."

Places are today subject to contrary tendencies. They lose some functions, which may scale up to fewer more centralized places, or down to numerous more dispersed places, and they gain other functions, which are scaling up and down from other places. This prompts premature prophecies of the abolition of space and the obsolescence of place. At the same time, a growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care.

In Portuguese and English.