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Saturday, December 4, 2010

Jill's Alaska

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdMmTHuizbI

"Even people that will never venture north seem to take great comfort in its possibilities."

Ring a bell?

"I think this question of perspective as travelers is important to think about. What we see depends on what we expect to see, what we want to see, what we've seen before. The value of travel is that it takes us outside of ourselves, and also deeper within. It reminds us that all places are connected to all other places."

I like her recognition here of how an experience of a place is completely contingent on the self through which that experience is being filtered. Such differences in Selves explain the differences in preferences among the students in the class for the different regions we read of in all the books. (I do think Tien was onto something here, about how perhaps it was not the narrators that some did not like in the case of Abbey or Fredston but how the narrative tone reflected the landscape,)

An interesting land ethic could be one based on travel. I am reminded again of Emerson's invisible floating eye, a sensation of combined anonymity or omnipresence I have felt on the road and in somehow being somewhere where the self is unacknowledged by outsiders, that place becomes like Morton's "anywheres".

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