The Place You Love is Gone

“An accounting of home is an inventory of loss”, and this book is Melissa’s personal and poetic inventory of the loss of three places in particular: The Akron OH of her childhood, the Hoboken NJ of young adulthood, and the towns of New York state leveled and flooded to create reservoirs to slake the insatiable thirst of New York City. “What we are is where we have been. That is all there is.”

The book is an interweaving of three things: poignant reminiscences from her past of things that have been destroyed to make room for ‘progress’, angry tirades at human foolishness and thoughtlessness, and horrifying statistics at what we are losing to make room for more people and their possessions:

Melissa also reveals what is spent each year to convince us against all reason that all this is on the right track, illustrated in the graphic above. As Josh Buermann puts it “It costs almost nothing now to produce a pair of bluejeans but an astronomical amount to convince me to buy them.”

Our sense of place is what orients us, and provides context for our lives, from birth: “Here the baby traces the map of mother’s face with his fingers, over rills and crevasses and seismic disturbances. He feels them with an intensity that does not even recognize their separateness from his own regional being.” We are all a part of the places we live within, and when those places are destroyed, a part of us dies with them. “You might have an easier time of it if someone would just acknowledge the fundamental existential tragedy of more driveways, of what is lost and how it hurts to know that it will never come back…Cognitive maps, formed by the brain upon first viewing a place, really don’t like to be changed, as scientists who have studied the way we find our way have learned.”

Although Melissa’s stories are touching, and will probably resonate with some of your own stories of places lost, the real power of the book is in its poetic laments for what all of this means, writ large, multiplied by six billion. After all, while loss of place at the local, personal level is (literally) unsettling, even devastating, loss of place at the global level is catastrophic:

She is saying, of course, what John Gray says in Straw Dogs, but arrived at from a different train of thought and feeling, and expressed in a different voice: That our civilization has entered its final century, and that there is no stopping it from bringing about its own demise, as all civilizations before have done, smug in their belief that they are somehow different, unique, immune to the inherent failings of empires built on the presupposition and need for endless growth.

Melissa talks about the sense of “weird happiness” she feels at each piece of news that reaffirms the validity of these feelings of “lunacy” — that the terrible reign of human animals on this planet is nearing its end. We feel it first in our bones, an instinctive sense of dread and foreboding. Then we feel it emotionally, the sense of loss and grief and anger and guilt, that wells up with each March of the Penguins, when what Gray calls our biophilia, love for all life on Earth, smashes into the growing realization that all that life is dying at an accelerating and unstoppable rate. And finally, we make the rational case, which we keep to ourselves, because what is the point in pointing out what is obvious to those ready for such awful truth, and unfathomable to those who are not yet ready, who still think the cure for the addiction is more of the drug?

Women seem to be further along this curve of understanding than men, if more reticent to articulate it publicly (do they talk about it among themselves, in private? — I suspect not). Perhaps this is because most women are more intuitive, more grounded, less abstracted, and more in touch with their emotions than most men. They are also, mostly, more accepting than men, better suited to make the best of what is, instead of trying to radically change it. I used to think that was meekness, but now I see it more as canniness, ‘knowing better’ than to expect to change what cannot be changed (though it doesn’t stop them from trying, and hoping) — pragmatic instead of idealistic. That is not rewarded much in this world, but it makes sense.