Another book that I read about a month ago is “Maphead” by Ken Jennings. Oh, it was an amazing book, really, funny and informative and endearing. All about maps and other geography related stuff that, you know, melts me like butter in the sun.
I don’t remember when I’ve last started crying as many times when reading a book – but in this case, not because it was sad, but because of how touched I felt from recognizing myself in all the nerdy geography buffs and mapheads Jennings described.
This just proves it. I AM a geographer. It wasn’t just coincidence that I started studying it back in 2009. I think spatially, in systems, I am visual in my way of understanding the world. And places matter. Jennings describes the concept of topophilia, which is from the Greek for “love of place”, and describes the strong sense of place that some people have, an intense connection to landscape. Jennings continues:
Young topophiles are most deeply shaped by the environments where they first became aware they had an environment: they imprint, like barnyard fowl. Baby ducks will follow the first moving object they see in the first few hours after they hatch. If it’s their mother, great; if it’s not, they become the ducklings you see following pigs or tractors around the farm on hilarious Sunday-morning news pieces. /…/ Falling in love with places is just like falling in love with people: it can happen more than once, but never quite like your first time.
For me, those places are widely spread, a legacy left in me from my vagabond parents. It’s Skarpnäck, obviously, and Södermalm, which are the two neighborhoods in Stockholm where I spent most of my time before the age of seven. The Stockholm archipelago, where my family rented a small cottage on a tiny island without electricity and running water. The southern Finnish rural landscape, with small fields, lakes, forest patches and tiny villages – the sun going down behind the spruce forest beyond the wheat field that lay at the foot of the hill of my grandmother’s house. The red earth and hot, dry smells of southeastern Africa, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Tanzania. The turquoise waters of Greek islands.
I’ve seen many other places after that, landscapes that are more beautiful, dramatic, fascinating. And I wouldn’t be able to say which ones I like the most. I just like landscapes. But with Stockholm, Uusimaa in Finland, Tanzania, Greece, it is different. Those are places that I feel a bond to, in a way that goes beyond liking.
Jennings ends one of the book’s chapters with a quote by Simone Weil. It says:
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and the least recognized need of the human soul.
I couldn’t agree more.
Katja Malmborg 