De Locis (“On Places”)

Two weeks ago, my husband and I went on an anniversary trip to Estes Park, a favorite vacation spot of ours because it’s not too far from our house while also being far enough removed from our everyday lives to feel like a different world. After that, I traveled to West Virginia for a Latin immersion event with the SALVI organization.

In the span of two weeks, I experienced two very different kinds of travel: one to a beautiful, familiar place with someone I love, the other to an unfamiliar place full of (mostly) unfamiliar people where I had to learn and adapt and challenge myself to make new connections. Being the nerd that I am, I can’t help but do what I always do, i.e., draw connections between my experiences and literature. And these two trips have underscored the fact that traveling and reading aren’t so very different from each other.

I’m certainly not the first to notice the similarity. Indeed, the Latin word locus, which means “place” (whence the English word location), can mean both a physical location and a passage in a text. Just as literary loci mark moments in the journey from the beginning to the end of a text, physical places mark moments in the journey of our lives.

Sometimes these stops allow us time to reflect on our identities, to evaluate and reaffirm our place in the fabric of things. For example, two weeks ago, my husband and I went on a hike we had first completed on our anniversary seven years ago (a hike from the Wild Basin trailhead to Calypso Cascades, if anyone’s curious). Somehow, it was both familiar and different. On the one hand, it served as a reminder of the things that are constant in our lives, like our love for each other, our passion for adventure, the wonders of our state. The way we return to these places again and again symbolizes the way we return to each other again and again. On the other hand, we also noticed the changes wrought by the passage of time, like the (unwelcome) differences in our bodies’ abilities and the (welcome) differences in our relationships with our children, who have matured so much in the past seven years that we no longer felt that twinge of guilt about leaving them with someone else.

We also stopped at Sprague Lake. I have included a photo below, because…well, just look at it. Need I say more?

Just over a year ago, I sat on a bench and basked in that view while I finished the first draft of Her Undying Thirst. When I returned with Kris this year, I showed him that very bench, and he said, “Maybe someday people will point to it and say, ‘This is where she wrote it.’” My husband’s unfounded confidence in me notwithstanding, returning after a year to that beautiful, unchanged place made me realize how much my life has changed since then: three more drafts of that novel, the second draft of another novella written, another novel underway, dozens of query letters sent. And, with Kris’ help, I was encouraged to think about how much our lives might change in the future, too.

A literary locus can do the same thing. When I return to a favorite passage from a familiar text, I always take comfort in its familiarity, but I also interpret it differently every time. My experiences and interactions change me through the years, and the way I navigate literary worlds changes too. This is a source of frustration to my students, perhaps, who frequently complain that I can’t give a straight answer on, for example, whether I think Penelope knows Odysseus is the beggar in Odyssey Book 19. After all, the words themselves don’t change. How is it that different people can understand those words so differently? How is that the same person can understand them differently? How is it that the passage of time can change how one perceives letters arranged in a fixed way on a page? Often, when I notice that my interpretation of a text has changed, it presents me with the opportunity to consider my own growth, just as revisiting Sprague Lake highlighted the progression of my life’s journey.

But what about the second kind of locus? The unfamiliar one, the one that makes me see the world – and myself – entirely anew?

A year ago, when I went to Greece to participate in a summer seminar for the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, it was a joyful, soul-shaking experience. When I am home in Colorado, I am defined by my relationships to those around me. I am a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, a teacher. In Greece, I was none of those things. There were no expectations of me at all, except that I would see and learn. For the first time in a long time, I was just Reina. And this allowed me not only to drink in the world around me but also to forge new friendships, ones that defied definition because we were in a place where we were all undefined except as learners and explorers. What bonds we forged! How strange, how wondrous it was that so many strangers could come together and find significance in each other simply because we were sharing an experience of place. As the seminar drew to a close, the opposite became true, too: the places became significant because we were sharing them. And…AND…(this is something that brings tears to my eyes when I think about it)…finding significance in these places and in the people with whom we shared them is something we had in common with people from thousands of years ago, for whom these locations were ritual, celebratory sites.

So it goes with literary loci. In texts, we can visit new worlds, experience new perspectives, consider new ideas. Since the book has no expectations of us and does not define us in any way, we can simply be an audience, unfettered by our usual identities, and we can share those experiences with others in ways that strengthen our bond both with each other and with the texts. For example, my sister and I have both been to Basgiath War College despite the fact that it’s an entirely imaginary place. I have friendships that have thrived thanks to a shared affection for the desert planet Arrakis. And…AND…(see parenthetical statement above about tears)…finding significance in these texts and the people with whom we share them is something we have in common with people from thousands of years ago. For example, in the 1^st century BCE, Cicero wrote a letter to his brother praising the poetry of Lucretius. His appreciation of that literary locus is something he shared with his brother, and it is something he shares with me.

Now really, how fucking cool is that?

I’d love to hear your thoughts about passages/places in the comments below. Feel free to subscribe if you want to be notified whenever I post something new:

In proximum, Regina Vestra