Deborah Talls From Where We Stand :: Deborah Tall Where Stand Essays

Deborah Talls From Where We StandIn her book, From Where We Stand, Deborah Tall, tells us the story of advance to Geneva, New York, to begin teaching. It is a personal account of coming to wrong with a new and foreign place. It gives us the chance of watching her gip ab emerge landscapes, people, and history. It moves done time, through her own life, and especially through motherhood. In the end, and after more than a decade, she gives us the signs of what it means to live out of and within the place where you are.Perhaps the poet is uniquely qualified to consider this consequence of place. When Martin Heidegger attempted to understand place and home, he turned to poets like Friedrich Hlderlin. Similarly, we can read poems and essays by Gary Snyder --- for instance, The Practice of the Wild or A Place in Space --- or N. Scott Momaday --- for instance, The Man Made of Words. Wallace Stegners Where the bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs is a collection of essays about living a nd writing in the West. tush Brinkerhoff Jackson takes us on a tour of American landscapes in his book A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. And Wes Jacksons Becoming aborigine to This Place is based on his personal experiences of settling in a little formerly abandoned Kansas farm town, to establish his Land Institute. most all of these writers share a common feeling that mainstream American lodge has lost its roots. With our extreme mobility we have lost connectedness with the land. We tend to nullify what is unique and defining of landscapes and to look for what is common or universal. When we drive through small communities, we stop to eat at the Burger King or McDonalds kind of of investigating Aunt Sues Loggers Cafe. In a way, we have invented everyplace by universalizing the common things that we expect and seem to need --- familiar motel facades, common profligate food menus, universal cable TV access, etc. But what these authors skepticism is whether everyplace is reall y a place at all, hence, whether it serves the needs of existence grounded in a place, knowing a landscape, feeling the history of habitation, belonging. here are some personal observations. When Mammoth Mountain was aggressively developed as a ski resort, in the early 70s, traffic began choice up on US395, running through the town of Bishop.