theparisreview: Blast from the Past: “This happens to be how many of us enter the great map. O
theparisreview:Blast from the Past:“This happens to be how many of us enter the great map. One night, you locate a distant childhood intersection. You leave the street map and enter the scene, passing seamlessly from map to territory. But there are no goofy hijinks or bloody corpses there. No sublime horses. Just a bright, sunny street with uneven sidewalks, lined with parked cars—a place that once contained everything that you knew and needed to know, which once held the entire range of possible truths. Then you take a Google-step back, and suddenly it’s a bit less sunny and a bit more populated. You swing around to your left, and now the sky is overcast and foreboding. A step forward and a neighborhood man you once knew, who was pictured sitting on his porch a frame ago, has vanished. Now the sun is out again, but setting. This private territory, with its radically shifting light, its dreamlike angles, and its specters popping in and out of view—that odd combination of detailed recollection and ever-thickening fog—resembles the structure of memory itself. It’s like visiting a lost place. It’s not the grandest idea but, at certain moments in life, it’s the best we’ve got.”—Avi Steinberg, “The Grand Map”(Images courtesy of Jon Rafman.)This touches– in its own lovely, ephemeral way– upon the issues raised by Eavan Boland's That The Science Of Cartography Is Limited. One can only imagine how the “Google-step back” would affect the mapping of an 1847 famine road in Ireland. -- source link
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