From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place

By Deborah Tall

Book Overview

Why does a particular landscape move us? What is it that attaches us to a particular place? Deborah Tall's From Where We Stand is an eloquent exploration of the connections we have with places--and the loss to us if there are no such connections. A typically rootless child of several American suburbs, haunted as an adult by the need to belong to an authentic place, Deborah Tall set out to make a true home for herself in the landscape to which circumstance had brought her--the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. In a mosaic of personal anecdotes, historical sketches, and lyrical meditations, she interweaves her own story with the story of this place and its people--from the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois, to European settlers, to the many utopians who sensed a spiritual resonance here and were inspired.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801854229
• ISBN13: 9780801854224
• Release Date: June 1996
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 241 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

Know Where We Stand, Then We Know Where We Are

My understanding and practice of landscaping is limited to the home and garden variety. Even at this level of home maintenance my skills and interests are limited. And I should be vacationing at a national park, say, the Grand Canyon or Yosemite, I would be as Moses standing on Pisgah taking in the general effect of the scenery from a distance. It comes as an entirely new revelation then, for one to be connected to or be part of a landscape takes more than Scott's fertilizers for the lawn, bordered fences, or sightseeing the Yosemite Valley. After accepting a teaching position at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the author and her poet husband make their home in the Finger Lakes Region at upstate New York. There, the author begins her interrogative journey on this vast landscape of terra incognita and eventually finding herself (and does her family) to belong to the land(scape) and not merely as a transient trampling through it with indifference. The book is repleted with historical anecdotes, myths, and local interests. It's is not a technical tome about geography, history, and anthropology of the Finger Lakes. Rather, this is the author's journal of how she strives to be with the land upon she dwells. As the author discovers, the landscape is the embodied lessons of the past for the present, and instructions for the future. The scenery of a place is only a prop. Without a landscape there can be no scenery. And that what makes this book rare and instructive. Deborah Hall's work has filled a void in my understanding of our culture. I now think more about the history, the town, and the neigbhorood (including neighbors) where I live. Perhaps too, I will come to know the land where I stand, and not just my own lawn.