Not Simply Itself
Early this morning, having listened to the BBC World Service‘s updated account of anguished realities in Ukraine and Gaza, of the forthcoming election in Great Britain taking place ‘against a pretty sour backdrop’ with voters not liking ‘any of the politicians or any of the political parties’, being citizens of a country ‘that senses it is on the wrong track and that life is getting worse’, I found myself reading an essay by Alice Albinia about a recent book, The Rising Down. It chronicles ‘the human experience of land and describes with acuity how the places we know are often linked through our experiences, thoughts and memories to other lands.’ The book’s author, Alexandra Harris, describes this as ‘the very common, complicated, unpredictable habit humans have of making places from other places, so that nowhere is simply itself.’ When this is acknowledged, Albinia writes, even patches of territory will be found to ‘sing’. It seems to me that political rhetoric worldwide moves in the opposite direction; and that that accounts in part for serial political, cultural and religious deadlocks.
