2015-03-11



I'm nothing. My ancestors' bones are not buried here. What do I know? If you want to talk about place, the sense of place, or the placedness of human beings prior to the mid-nineteenth centry, you're talking about something entirely different that we have almost no idea of.... 
The other side of it is that we are capable of beginning now to think of the whole Planet Earth as our place-- which nobody was quite up to before. They didn't have quite that much information. But saying that is not to free people to say, "I am a citizen of Plaent Earth, I am a member of this planet." They've got to prove it. It's too easy to say, "I am a citizen of the Cosmos, I live in the Universe, I am home here..." 
Well, come on, kid, show me how you do it. So you still can only know place specifically... You have to know the particulars. If you can begin to talk about the particulars, you might then be able to get a sense of what a larger planetary space might ultimately be. So it does come down to starting out with particulars, and being engaged with them. And that's really hard to come by.  
..........--Gary Snyder



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