My friend (a fellow student at Whitworth University) once told me that of all the memories he has gathered at college, one of the things he will most acutely miss is walking through the woods behind campus. (Okay, they’re not really woods; they’re really just a little string of pine trees called “the back 40.” Ask someone else how it got that name.) Whitworth is somewhat famous for having a pretty campus, especially during the fall. The trees turn a radiant orange, and every lamp-post on the walkway is ornamented with a festoon of flowers. Sometimes you can catch a whiff of the scent when you are walking in a cross-wind. It’s even beautiful in the rain, especially when you watch it while sipping a cup of tea from those big, circular windows in the library (which I like to call Hobbit windows).
But let’s return to the woods. The curious thing about them is that they're not really part of the campus at all. Yes, it’s campus property, but we didn’t make it. It’s simply…the Earth. Just a little square of untroubled earth in the middle of Spokane. And when I recall my fondest childhood haunts, I’ve realized most of them just involve frolicking around in little pieces of earth.
I am willing to bet that most of you have some similar haunt. Whether it was some swing-set at summer camp, or a place on the dock overlooking a lake, or even a dumpy corner in the backyard where you made mud-castles, there is some little place that you have a peculiar relationship with. If you returned to those places, it would be hard to pinpoint what was so special about them—it’s just a squeaky swing set, just a dock, just an unkempt portion of yard. To anyone else, it would mean nothing. Even to you, it’s hard to say what it means. Sometimes, we say we love it because it reminds us of the days when “life was so simple.” But my life is anything but simple now, and I’m still going to miss the woods behind campus. So what exactly are we experiencing?
Fortunately, the English language provides a word for such a feeling (Way to go English! Most of the time I have to use German to describe my emotions). It is called topophilia—literally meaning “the love of place.” The hypothesis is simple—a human being can fall in love with a place, just as you can fall in love with a person, or a pet, or a good book. Of course, falling in love with a person is quite different from falling in love with a book, but they are both a kind of relationship. Topophilia is a different kind of relationship altogether, but it is a relationship nonetheless, and like all relationships, it can change, grow, diminish—or break your heart.
We have come to think that when poets speak of “the soul of the river and woods” they are merely being anthropomorphic. They are just finding a roundabout way (as all poets do) to say that something is pretty. I find that view boring. What if I told you that when the poets spoke of the soul of the river they meant exactly what they said? Can you fall in love with something that has no soul? You can’t fall in love with your toothbrush, or a cigarette butt. (If you do, you are very strange.) Can a river have a soul? You could argue that a river is just water molecules rushing over bedrock. This is true, and humans are just blood and guts wrapped up in skin. But most of us agree that there is something else in humans besides just blood and guts, and I think there is something else in the river besides water. The river is a body, but it is not the body itself that animates it. There is something inside the body, something alive, shining and shimmering through the ripples and flecks of light. And that is the thing we fall in love with.
Do you follow me? If so, it should be no surprise to you that the ancients used to populate the woods with elves and the river with water-sprites. It should make perfect sense that the Greeks invented Thor and Triton, the god of thunder and the god of the sea. It explains so well why environmentalists will yammer on about preserving the earth to the point of a moral argument. From as long as we can remember, mankind cannot shake the idea that there are—for lack of a better word—people behind the cogs and wheels of nature. A love of place. A topophilic relationship.
Magical places are a theme found all over good literature, and sometimes sadly lacking in modern day works. Children’s literature can attest to it the most: Peter Pan, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Bridge to Terabithia are very heavily centered on magical places. We all loved making maps as kids, and Ernest H. Shepard’s map of the Hundred-Acre-Wood reflects that childlike fascination beautifully: this is where Rabbit lives, this is where Eeyore lost his tail, this is where we found the heffalump (or did we?) and this is my Thoughtful Spot. You will remember that Milne ends the story with a place, as he writes in that memorable ending sentence: “But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”
But topophilia is not just a childhood idiosyncrasy. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings places incredible emotional importance on its geographical content. I have heard many people complain about Tolkien’s endless descriptions of how such-and-such mountain looked on the 5th of May, and how it rained here, and how they camped in such-and-such a place, and when are they going to get out the forest anyway? I admit that I am guilty of this complaint as much as anyone else, but perhaps we are missing the point. We need to read Middle-Earth not as a setting, but as a character, a character that plays an integral part in the advancement of the plot. The Prancing Pony has such a different personality from Rivendell, which has a different personality from the Mines of Moria, and so on, which together composes the organic personality of Middle-Earth. It’s hard not to get teary-eyed as Sam recalls his strawberry patches back in the Shire, or when Frodo sails into the Grey Havens.
Many of us are college students, and we’ll be returning home for Thanksgiving soon. There is no better time than Fall to revisit that Enchanted Place you knew about in the backyard, or wherever it may be. Perhaps you haven’t chatted in a while, and it’s high time you did some catching up. If you can miss the backyard, it’s not so far-fetched to suppose that the backyard misses you too.
