There are many books that recount the astonishing adventures of brave individuals in fabulous locations. I could not write one of those books. My adventures are not so astonishing. I am not so brave. But some of the places I have been are fabulous, and I have one thing in common with those brave authors: the urge to write something about where I have been and something about the adventures – however small they were – that I have had. No, I am not even Prufrock, let alone Prince Hamlet, but although I never saw those attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, I did at least look into the night sky, and sometimes I remembered what I saw.
At least, I think I remembered what I saw. As time moves on, it is increasingly hard to be sure, and it is uncertainty that gives me confidence. Unlike the brave authors of those astonishing adventures I am only going to write about things that happened so long ago that they may as well have been forgotten by now, and if I remember them at all I will be forgiven for remembering them imprecisely. And because these things happened so long ago, it is inevitable that they happened in places that no longer exist. Yes, Greenland is still there; Iceland, Ecuador, San Francisco, Oxford, Birmingham – they are all still on the map, of course. But what defines a place is not necessarily what you can see on a map. Marcel Proust wrote: “The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience”. Revisiting a road that he had known well many years before, and finding that the people he associated with it were no longer there Proust wrote: “The reality that I had known no longer existed. It sufficed that Mme Swann did not appear, in the same attire and at the same moment, for the whole avenue to be altered,”
Enough time has passed, and the cast of characters is sufficiently changed, that, even if you were to visit the site of one of my adventures, it would be gone, in every way but on the map.
Peter G Knight 