Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
BEARING
n
.:
the situation or horizontal direction of one
point with respect to the compass
An individual is not
distinct from his place. He is his place.
—GABRIEL MARCEL
J
ames Joyce's alter ego,
Stephen Dedalus
,
is bored in his geography classes—all those
place-names in America seem so far away to him. But when the places are
his,
his native
surroundings, he has no trouble with their names. This is what he writes on the flyleaf of his
geography textbook:
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
Asachild,Ilikedtowritemyaddressusingasimilarhierarchy—thoughIwasapparently
more of a space geek than wee Stephen, so my address featured a few steps (“The Solar
System, Orion Arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Virgo Supercluster”) that he skipped. I'm sure my
elaborate envelope-addressing system annoyed the mailman, but it delighted me. One of the
fundamentalquestionsofchildhoodis“WhereamI?”andchildrenwanttoknowtheanswer
on every level, from the microlocal to the galactic.
“What was it that identified us as closet geographers, perhaps as children, long before we
knew enough to put a name on our private passions?” Peirce Lewis, then the president of
the Association of American Geographers,
asked in a 1985 address
.
The “visceral love of
maps” is only part of the equation, he said. “The second, common to us all, is topophilia, an
equally visceral passion for the earth—more particularly, some magic or beloved place on
the surface of the earth.”
The word “topophilia,” from the Greek for “love of place,” was popularized by the
geo-