Knowing Your Place
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. --T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding, from Four Quartets Travel may satisfy our wanderlust but it needs to be contrasted to something. To a sense of home, to a sense of place. That small home town that you couldn't wait to leave may have more to do with your identity than you realize. Some very good writers explore the sense of a ties to the land and a hometown. 1. Home Town, Tracy Kidder (1998). Portrait of Northampton, Massachusetts. Bought used State Department bookstore. 2. Yearning for the Land: A Search for the Importance of Place, John Warfield Simpson (2002). Simpson explores the ties to land, time and history through the naturalist John Muir's ties to Scotland Wisconsin. Bought used but can't remember where. 3. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on th...