To Know a Place

My English teacher, Jennifer Lloyd, gave me a copy of T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909 - 1962 as a gift when I left school, with the inscription, “May this book be a source of inspiration and pleasure to you in your ‘exploration.’” At the top of the page she had written, in her beautiful handwriting, this excerpt from Eliot’s Little Gidding. I have the book still, minus its dust-jacket. The spine is cracked, the blue cover is faded, the edges are worn. But the words are still alive on the page.

And there has been a certain amount of exploration, if truth be told, over these past two months, of the mental and affective as well as the physical kind, quite apart from all the exploring (and getting lost) that has happened over a lifetime….

All this travel - time travel, thought travel, air travel - makes me think about place - what a place is, and what it means to know a place.