Total Geography (2) – three starting points

When I explain my approach to Geography I keep finding myself returning to a small set of quotations and examples that illustrate where I am coming from.

T.S.Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

from “Little Gidding”

I often say that this is the whole point of studying Geography. We explore, we learn about places, we discover new things about the world, we have experiences. And then we apply all of that experience to our own viewpoint, to what we see out of our own window. And by seeing our own place in the light of all these other things that we have discovered and explored, we can see it clearly, and know it properly, for the first time. How we understand the places with which we are familiar changes as we explore new places with which we can compare them.

But what does that exploration and discovery involve?

Marcel Proust wrote:

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others – in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.

from “In Search of Lost Time”

The aim of Geography is to see more, and one way to see more is to see through different people’s eyes, to take on board their experiences, their attitudes, their viewpoints. Our aim as Geographers is to be able to see in the landscape the things that a variety of other different types of people see, and to absorb their perspectives into our own. Then, recalling Eliot, we can come back from all that exploring and better know our own place, and ourselves.

Rudyard Kipling wrote:

…what should they know of England who only England know?

from “The English Flag”

If we know only one thing, have only one opinion, see from only one point of view, how can we judge that? In class with my students I use a simple analogy to explain this point. I hold up my whiteboard marker pen: “Look at this fat pen. But how do I know to call it a fat pen if this is the only pen I’ve seen?” I take a regular biro from my pocket. “Ah, yes, that one was a fat pen.” Only when I have something to compare with can I make my evaluation. If I know only one thing, I can know nothing about it. What can I know of this pen, if this pen is the only pen I know?

So we can’t judge something without context; without comparison. We can’t evaluate our own view of the world without placing it in the context of other views. I can’t really know my own “place” until, with Eliot, I have explored others and returned. And, with Proust, my journey of discovery is an exploration not only of places, but of other points of view.

As a Geographer, then, as I set out to explore and discover (or, as we say nowadays, to “engage with”) the world around me, what is it exactly that I need to do? How do I do Total Geography? I’ll consider that in future “Total Geography” posts.

A Proustian view of Physical Geography?

“…getting to know Proust is not the acquisition of a bundle of facts, it is familiarity with a world of the imagination in which one gradually feels at home…”
Richard Bales, Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to Marcel Proust.

Getting to know Physical Geography is not the acquisition of a bundle of facts, it is familiarity with a world of insight and appreciation in which one gradually feels at home. Learning Physical Geography is a bit like getting to know Proust. Or perhaps that’s just me. Richard Bales, in the chapter from which I took the quotation at the head of this post, goes on to say that getting to know Proust is “the growing realisation that humanity is subject to an enormous range of vicissitudes, but obedient also to recurrent laws. It is the recognition that life, drab though vast swathes of it may be, can be transfigured in rare moments of insight. It is above all the acknowledgement that what is humble and what is sublime cohabit in indissoluble symbiosis. For if there is just one lesson one retains from a reading of Proust it is that what seems trivial is often what is most significant and revelatory.” I need to think about this in the context of Physical Geography. Of course, getting to know anything is about becoming familiar with its world, not just about compiling the bundle of its facts. This isn’t just about Physical Geography. But it can be about Physical Geography, if Physical Geography is what you are getting to know. Subject to enormous variability but obedient to recurrent laws. The ordinary transfigured in moments of insight. The mundane and the extraordinary in indissoluble symbiosis. Yes, that’s Physical Geography. But isn’t it everything? And isn’t that the point?

No, not that road

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about Jack Kerouac here. Well, probably not much. I suppose it isn’t really a total coincidence that I called a new blog “On the road” while I had a new copy of Kerouac’s book lying around in the room, but equally there was no deliberate connection, no implication, no reference intended. I haven’t even read Kerouac yet, or at least not much of it, and from what I have read so far his road, except in the barest essentials that we all share, does not seem a lot like mine. I am wondering though, about how much of what we do is driven by things we don’t notice, and whether I would still have thought of this title for the blog if Kerouac hadn’t  crept through the corner of my eye into the corner of my subconscious? And would I be writing such long sentences if I wasn’t in the middle – or not yet even the middle but only somewhere, deep in a subordinate subclause, from where the middle is still several volumes away – of reading Proust? I am also wondering, now I’ve brought it up, about how far any of our roads are really different from anybody else’s. There are a lot of different journeys underway on the M6 tonight. It isn’t necessarily the road that defines the journey.