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| I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. Even on the first page I was so affected by the book's intensity I felt my body sever itself and pull away from the chair where I sat reading the book that lay before me on the table. But even though I felt my body dissociating, my entire being remained so concertedly at the table that the book worked its influence not only on my soul but on every aspect of my identity. It was such a powerful influence that the light surging from the pages illumined my face; its incandescence dazzled my intellect but also endowed it with brilliant lucidity. This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace. I sat at the table, turning the pages, my mind barely aware that I was reading, and my whole life was changing as I read the new words on each new page. I felt so unprepared for everything that was to befall me, and so helpless, that after a while I moved my face away instinctively as if to protect myself from the power that surged form the pages. It was with dread that I became aware of the complete transformation of the world around me, and I was overtaken by a feeling of loneliness I had never before experienced -- as if I had been stranded in a country where I knew neither the lay of the land nor the language and the customs.
I fastened onto the book even more intensely in the face of the helplessness brought on by that feeling of isolation. Nothing besides the book could reveal to me what was my necessary course of action, what it was that I might believe in, or observe, and what path my life was to take in the new country in which I found myself. I read on, turning the pages now as if I were reading a guidebook which would lead me through a strange and savage land. Help me, I felt like saying, help me find the new life, safe and unscathed by any mishap. Yet I knew the new life was built on words in the guidebook. I read it word for word, trying to find my path, but at the same time I was also imagining, to my own amazement, wonders upon wonders which would surely lead me astray.
The book lay on my table reflecting its light on my face, yet it seemed similar to the other familiar objects in the room. While I accepted with joy and wonder the possibility of a new life in the new world that lay before me, I was aware that the book which had changed my life son intensely was in fact something quite ordinary. My mind gradually opened its doors and windows to the wonders of the new world the words promised me, and yet I seemed to recall a chance encounter that had led me to the book. But the memory was no more than a superficial image, one that hadn't completely impressed itself on my consciousness. As I read on, a certain dread prompted me to reflect on the image: the new world the book revealed was so alien, so odd and astounding that, in order to escape being totally immersed in this universe, I was anxious to sense anything related to the present.
What if I raised my eyes from the book and looked around at my room, my wardrobe, my bed, or glanced out the window, but did not find the world as I knew it? I was inhabited with this fear.
Minutes and pages followed one another, trains went by in the distance, I heard my mother leave and then return; I listened to the everyday roar of the city, the tinkle of the yogurt vendor's bell int he street, car engines, all the sounds familiar to me,a s if I were hearing outlandish sounds. At first I thought there was a downpour outside, but it turned out to be the sound of some girls jumping rope. I thought it was beginning to clear up, but then there was the patter of raindrops on my window. I read the following page, the next one, and the ones after that; I saw light seeping through the threshold of the other life; I saw what I new and what I didn't know; I saw my life, the path I assumed my own life would take . . .
The more I turned the pages, the more a world that I could have never imagined, or perceived, pervaded my being and took hold of my soul. All the things I had known or considered previously had now become trivial details, but things I had not been aware of before now emerged from their hiding places and sent me signals. Had I been asked to say what these were, it seemed I couldn't have given an answer while I still read on; I knew I was slowly making progress on a road that had no return, aware that my former interest in and curiosity for things were now closing behind me, but I was so excited and exhilarated by the new life that opened before me that all creation seemed worthy of my attention. I was shuddering and swinging my legs with the excitement of this insight when the wealth, the multiplicity, and the complexity of possibilities turned into a kind of terror.
In the light that surged from the book into my face, I was terrified to see shabby rooms, frenetic buses, bedraggled people, faint letters, lost towns, lost lives, phantoms. A journey was involved; it was always about a journey. I beheld a gaze that followed me on the journey, one that seemed to appear in the least expected places only to disappear, making itself sought all the more because it was so elusive, a tender gaze that had long been free of guilt and blame . . . I longed to become that gaze. I longed to exist in a world beheld by that gaze. I wanted it so much that I almost believed in my existence in that world. There was no necessity even to convince myself: I did in fact live there. Given that I lived there, the book must, of course, be about me. Someone had already imagined my ideas and put them down.
- Orhan Pamuk, The New Life
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| It is useful to contrast with this "sociological imagination" the rather more diffuse quality which I have called "spatial consciousness" or the "geographical imagination." This imagination enables the individual to recognize the role of space and place in his own biography, to relate to the spaces he sees around him, and to recognize how transactions between individuals and between organizations are affected by the space that separates them. It allows him to recognize the relationship which exists between him and his neighborhood, his territory, or, to use the language of the street gangs, his "turf." It allows him to judge the relevance of events in other places (on other peoples' "turf") -- to judge whether the march of communism in Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos is or is not relevant to him wherever he is now. It allows him also to fashion and use space creatively and to appreciate the meaning of the spatial forms created by others. This "spatial consciousness" or "geographical imagination" is manifest in many disciplines. Architects, artists, designers, city planners, geographers, anthropologists, historians, and so on have all possessed it. But it has a far weaker analytic tradition behind it, and its methodology still relies heavily upon pure intuition. The main seat of the spatial consciousness in western culture today still lies in the plastic arts.
This distinction between the geographical and sociological imaginations is artificial when we seek to relate to the problems of the city, but it is all too real when we examine the ways we think about the city. There are plenty of those possessed with a powerful sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills among them) who nevertheless seem to live and work in a spaceless world. There are also those, possessed of a powerful geographical imagination or spatial consciousness, who fail to recognize that the way space is fashioned can have a profound effect upon social processes -- hence the numerous examples of beautiful but unlivable designs in modern living.
- David Harvey, Social Justice and the City
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| Humanistic geography's most important reminder has been that we do not live in an abstract framework of geometric spatial relationships; we live in a world of meaning.
- Tim Cresswell, In place/out of place: Geography, ideology, and transgression
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| If it is possible to speak of a "man" with a masculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a "man" with a feminine attribute, whatever that is, but still to maintain the integrity of the gender. But once we dispense with the priority of "man" and "woman" as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility.
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
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| The point, my dears, is not good nor evil -- but freedom. For an angel there is only one true freedom, and that, I'm honestly sad to say, is freedom from God. Freedom is the cause and effect. In this particular Creation, if freedom from God (worship of God, dependency on God, obedience to God) is what you're after, then I'm afraid evil's really the only game in town. What I'd like, what I'd love, is to have been given a nature that didn't even know God -- the fish in the pond who doesn't know life beyond it: the lawn, the house, the city, the country, the world . . .
Your thinkers wrestle with this notion of pure evil or, as they're so fond of calling it, evil for its own sake. I've no idea why. There's no such thing as evil for its own sake. All evil is motivated -- even mine. The torturer, the tyrant, the murderer, the consummate fabricator of fibs -- they're all doing it for something, even if they're doing it for pleasure. (The problem your thinkers have is understanding quite how the evildoer gets pleasure from his evil, but that's a different question.) Evil for its own sake is -- or would be if it existed -- madness; and even the barmy do what they do for some barmy reason. What pains the Old Boy most is not that I do evil, but that I do what causes me excruciating pain. What pains Him is that even perpetual and excruciating pain is a price worth paying for disentangling myself from Him. That's the crux of it. That's what He can't stand.
- Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer
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