Texts, Maps, and the Landscape

Abstract

People move in space, and we live our lives in time. In the time-scale of a human life, our surroundings change at different speeds, from the unmoving rocks through the slow shift of the course of a river, the growth of a tree and the slow walk of an elephant, to the frenetic sniffing of a mouse. Moving through a landscape, finding one’s way, can involve all these different rhythms of change, but when we tell others how to traverse the same ground, or record our experience with the intention of communicating the journey somehow, they figure in our account quite differently.