One of the good fortunes of my undergraduate education was that I went to school in a place.

It's not like I was just off somewhere doing stuff. No, we were all there together, those of us who were there at that time, and we were all endowed with a strong sense of being in a place.

We had a "geography" department which a delightful combination of the frivolous and the important. Everyone I knew who was a geography major was an interesting person, and most of them had seen places in foreign lands by the time they graduated. The foreign home away from home for these folks was Prague, where the department ran a foreign study program every other year. Prague is a very placeful place.

I took a class that was all about place in America: a study of places, and ideas about place, both comforting and disturbing, spiritual and political. There was a quote given in the syllabus that I have wanted to track down ever since, and I finally have in my hands a book called Space and Place, by Yi-Fu Tuan, a "geographer" according to the book jacket.

I would like to offer you, by way of temptation, the first few items from the list of Illustrations in this book:

1. Space as defined by the relative location and distance of places. Aivilik maps of their world.
2. The structure of the human body, space, and time.
3. "Center" implies "elevation," and vice versa: the example of Peking.
4. Ego- and ethnocentric organizations of space.
5. From space to place: the learning of a maze.
6. Distortions in drawn mazes.
7. Etak—Micronesian celestial navigation.
8. Tupaia's conception of the place-filled space (Pacific Ocean).
9. Mythical-conceptual spaces.
10. Ptolemaic cosmos.
11. Courtyard houses: the contrast between "interior" and "exterior" dramatized.