Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The most popular allegorical map ever drawn.
Watch out for the slide of Weak Morals!
Why this urge to turn every facet of life into a mappable journey? Hell, why see life
itself as a journey to Heaven, the way medieval Christian maps always did? That whole
metaphor isn't in the Bible anywhere. (Well, that's not strictly true. I'm sure there are lots
of verses about walking in righteous paths and so on. But nowhere, as far as I know, does
God tell the children of Israel, “Verily I say unto you that life is a highway. Yea, thou shalt
ride it, even all the night long.”)
For a long time I blamed writers like John Bunyan and Dante for this allegorical form of
cartacacoethes. Desperate to extract a story-line from a possibly dreary and didactic sub-
ject—the struggle to live a life worthy of Heaven—they seized on a quest narrative, a “pil-
grim's progress,” and mapmakers were quick to follow suit.
*
I wonder: how would history
be different if Bunyan or Dante had chosen to represent life not as a linear journey through
