Monday, August 24, 2009

More Reflections

It was many years ago when I was sitting on the island of Crete that I began to think about landscape and literature. I'd brought with me, among other books, a copy of the Odyssey and it occured to me as I sat there, staring out into the Aegean that a circuitous journey such as that of Odysseus could only have come out of a world of islands and archipelgos. Just as Anna Karenina and War and Peace seemed to have arisen from the great expanse of Russia.

Certainly types of narrative seemed suits to certain topographies. Austen to England, Dos Passos to America. I cannot seem to separate a literature from its geography. The desert from the forest. The mountains from the sea. My love of stories seems to grow out of the ground itself.

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