Interior landscapes

    Malebranche was right: we are not our own light.

-Flannery O'Connor, “Good Country People”

Image: Celestial map, found
Title: Thomas Bernhard

In full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space

Like a blazing comet, I’ve traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I’ve been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I’ve been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I’ve been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I’ve known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion….I’ve been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough.

-Antonio Tabucchi, Dreams of Dreams and the Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa
Image: Jane Hammond. 2004.
Title: Paul Klee

Trying to Find the Door

    A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have been from your birthplace to the place where you sit now reading this page… And when every place where you have ever been on every day of your life has been marked on the map of the true part of you, why then, reader, the map has been barely marked. There are still to mark all those places you have dreamed of yourself seeing or remembering or dreaming about.

-Gerald Murnane, Inland

Image: Chad Wys, from the series The Critique of Gesture
Title: Nod to Adam Fuss

Like a flag, I am surrounded by distances

The map is more interesting than the territory.

-Attributed, in a roundabout way, to Michel Houellebecq



Image: A chart of the Canarie and Madera Islands, ca. 1702-1707, NYPL Digitial Gallery
Title: Rilke, from Book of Images

The fundamental impermanence of things

…as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.

-John Ashbery, Three Poems 

Image: Ann Hamilton, untitled (from Body Object series, 1984-88

Title: Maggie Nelson, Bluets

My house was a house of winds

 

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”

―Clarice Lispector, Passion according to G.H. 

[Title thanks to Dana Levin's poem,"The Weatherman"]

Getting Lost(er)

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in… in this world we actually live in, distance ceases to be distance and to be blue when we arrive in it.

—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 2005




Image: Paul Harbutt, At world’s End II, 2007

Fields Engraved in the Soul

"Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had a map of his fields engraved in his soul. And Jean Wahl once wrote …The frothing of the hedges / I keep deep inside me… Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived."

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Image:  Sam Winston

The Sadness of Geography

"Do you understand the sadness of geography?"

—Michael Ondaatje

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Lands, a List (Mythological and Otherwise)

• Avalon
• Buyan, an island with the ability to appear and disappear in Russian mythology
• Shambhala
• Shangri-La, a fictitious valley in Tibet the idea of which may have been inspired by the myth of Shambhala
• Quivira and Cíbola, also known as the Seven Cities of Gold. These were suspected somewhere in America by the conquistadors.
• El Dorado, mythic city of gold.
• Atlantis
• Lemuria (continent)
• Mu (lost continent)
• Ys; a mythical city built on the coast of Brittany, and later swallowed by the ocean. Most versions of the legend place the city in the Douarnenez Bay.
• Cantre’r Gwaelod is the legendary ancient sunken realm said to have occupied a tract of fertile land lying between Ramsey Island and Bardsey Island in what is now Cardigan Bay to the west of Wales.

Image: La Sphere du Monde, 1549, by Oronce Fine

Eternity and it is Just as Flat and Wide

I see the world is flat and the map flat
that records it, and both page and world
speak each other forever. Put a fold
in eternity and it is just as flat and wide.
Take the map of the world and fold it
into a boat and the boat becomes the world.

-Dan Beachy-Quick from Spell 

[image: Johann Ruysch world map, 1507-1508]