On Knowing Where You Are

How do you answer the question, Where am I?  This post concerns this question in a broad sense, yet in a sense grounded in the concrete perceptual encounter with the world.  Our sense of where we are in space is a primary form of how our world is disclosed to us.  As Thomas Mann writes (and as I have cited him previously): 

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached, state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabound of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

Mann is admirable on this front in that he maintains important distinctions between space and time while showing their ultimate connection in a more general form, which we can call space-time for lack of a better term; lifeworld would probably do as well, but that term is typically invoked with historical and cultural meanings in mind.

Not surprisingly, my musings on this topic were set off by recent travels.  While visiting New York city, I found myself wondering where I was on several occasions.  And I don't mean I was pondering my place in the universe or some existential inquiry; no, I literally needed to know where I was, specifically whenever I got off the subway and emerged back on the surface streets.

One can figure out where he is in a few different ways.  Some of these ways are more "direct" in that one can instantly grasp his spatial orientation by perceiving landmarks, or, say, the position of the sun in the sky.  Simply by regarding one's visual horizon, one can immediately know which way is North, and thus which way all of the other cardinal directions point, and thus, most importantly, which way one must walk if the bar one his headed to is uptown. This was my consistent mode of spatial orientation while living in New Mexico.  When living in a town with uniformly low buildings and distinct mountain ranges in all directions, figuring out where you are and which direction to go is as easy as looking up.

Alternatively, one can figure out where he is in a more "indirect" fashion.  This requires reading signs and making inferences.  If I come out of the subway and need to walk East two avenues and then south for three blocks, then my typical strategy (amateur city-dweller that I am) is to read off the coordinates from the nearest corner, then pick a direction and walk until I see the next set of street signs, thus enabling me to infer what direction I just walked in, and determine how to further determine my course.  I felt alienated doing this.  I quickly learned that I could orient myself in the "direct" manner by identifying specific buildings on the horizon (e.g., the Freedom tower is downtown, so if I can see it, I know which way downtown is, and thus I know where I am).  But this doesn't always work in NYC, where you often can't see further than whatever random set of unremarkable buildings swallow up your horizon.

So, I like to know where I am by being able to simply look around.  But perhaps New Yorkers don't need my crude guess-and-check system to orient themselves when they emerge from the subway.  Perhaps after years of practice they have a little internalized map, like the GPS on your phone, with a red dot indicating where they are and the map adjusting accordingly.  I wouldn't be surprised if this ability were innate in all humans, and just a matter of whether it is cultivated by specific cultures.  It is now well known that Australian aboriginal speakers of Guugu Yimithirr do not rely on "ego centric" direction words at all (left, right, forward, backward, etc.), but rather always refer to the cardinal directions.  To quote a recent NYTimes article:  

Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.” 

The article proceeds to explain how the tribe's linguistic practices ingrain a sense of direction, to the point where speakers of this language simply "feel" directions, in the way someone with perfect pitch senses each note without having to calculate intervals.  This goes beyond the "direct" mode of spatial orientation I described above, however I would argue that it begins in the manner I describe above and becomes habituated to the point where the process is unconscious.

And this brings me back to Thomas Mann.  A change of setting is indeed one of the fastest ways to forget.  A new setting challenges you to orient yourself, to figure out where you are; whereas our home-spaces "feel like home" precisely because one knows where he is at all times.  In a new place we are set back to our "primitive, unattached state," which can be exhilarating, yet equally alienating. 

Mann on the peculiarity of new places

As I continue to slowly work my way through Thomas Mann's masterpiece, The Magic Mountain, I find a new gem every night. Since I have moved 3 times in just as many months this summer, this one was especially poignant:

There is, after all, something peculiar about the process of habituating oneself in a new place, the often laborious fitting in and getting used, which one undertakes for its own sake, and of set purpose to break it all off as soon as it is complete, or not long thereafter, and to return to one's former state. It is an interval, an interlude, inserted, with the object of recreation, into the tenor of life's main concerns; its purpose the relief of the organism, which is perpetually busy at its task of self-renewal, and which was in danger, almost in process, of being vitiated, slowed down, relaxed, by the bald, unjointed monotony of its daily course. But what then is the cause of this relaxation, this slowing-down that takes place when one does the same thing for too long at a time? Its is not so much physical or mental fatigue or exhaustion, for if that were the case, then complete rest would be the best restorative. It is rather something psychical; it means that the perception of time tends, through periods of unbroken uniformity, to fall away; the perception of time, so closely bound up with the consciousness of life that the one may not be weakened without the other suffering a sensible impairment. Many false conceptions are held concerning the nature of tedium. In general it is thought that the interesting and novelty of the time-content are what "make the time pass" ' that is to say, shorten it; whereas monotony and emptiness check and restrain its flow. This is only true with reservations. Vacuity, monotony, have, indeed, the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome. But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all. And conversely, a full and interesting content can put wings to the hour and the day; yet it will lend to the general passage of time a weightiness, a breadth and solidity which cause the eventful years to flow far more slowly than those poor, bare, empty ones over which the wind passes and they are gone. Thus what we call tedium is rather an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony. Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; when one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares. Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course. We are aware that the intercalation of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself. Such is the purpose of our changes of air and scene, of all our sojourns at cures and bathing resorts; it is the secret of the healing power of change and incident. Our first days in a new place, time has a youthful, that is to say, a broad and sweeping, flow, persisting for some six or eight days. Then, as one "gets used to the place," a gradual shrinkage makes itself felt. He who clings or, better expressed, wishes to cling to life, will shudder to see how the days grow light and lighter, how they scurry by like dead leaves, until the last week, of some four, perhaps, is uncannily fugitive and fleet. On the other hand, the quickening of the sense of time will flow out beyond the interval and reassert itself after the return to ordinary existence: the first days at home after the holiday will be lived with a broader flow, freshly and youthfully--but only the first few, for one adjust oneself more quickly to the rule than to the exception; and if the sense of time be already weakened by age, or--and is a sign of low vitality-it was never very well developed, one drowses quickly back into the old life, and after four-and-twenty hours it is as though one had never been away, and the journey had been but a watch in the night.

This passage, the veritable form of romantic German prose if there ever was one, beautifully merges form and content. From a literature perspective, I would love to hear someone weigh in on how common it is for a novel to include a piece of narration this long and detailed--not by a character in the book in the form of monologue, dialogue, or soliloquy--just straight narration by an omniscent authorial voice. (I believe this novel is an instance of the German Bildungsroman genre). The passage itself is an "interval, an interlude, inserted, with the object of recreation" into the story. Its literary function mirrors the content of which it speaks.

Back to Ze German Authors

If you know me at all, you know that Hermann Hesse is my favorite author. His last and greatest work Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) [Das Glasperlenspiel] is my favorite book. I like his stories, I identify with his characters, I like his style.
In keeping with my love of Hesse, I have always meant to read Thomas Mann's work since he was a great friend and literary interlocutor to Hesse. In fact, in Magister Ludi Hesse names one of his characters "Thomas van der Trave," which is a veiled allusion to Mann, who grew up in a town on the Trave river in Germany. Van der Trave is one of the most enlightened and noble characters in Hesse's masterpiece.
Finally, I have made time for Thomas Mann. It was almost as if he made time for me, as I saw a wonderful hard back edition of his master work, The Magic Mountain, at a used book sale on campus. I have only read the first few chapters, but already I'm struck by wonderful passages such as this:

Two days travel separated the youth--he was still too young to have thrust his roots down firmly into life--from his own world, from all that he thought of as his own duties, interests, cares and prospects; far more than he had dreamed it would when he sat in the carriage on the way to the station. Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath, possessed and wielded powers we generally ascribe to time. From hour to hour it worked changes in him, like to those wrought by time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached, state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabound of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter 1939, p. 4.

Contemplating the last few sentences has yielded extreme aesthetic pleasure for me. Mann's prose is enchanting. He evokes the image of the "primitive, unattached state" in order to make palpable the grandiosity of Space and Time. Whatever it is that Hesse and Mann have in common, it is most striking in passages like this one.