Back to Provence

I was recently blogging about the title A Year in Provence, and how much it appeals to me. (I've never read the book or seen the film and probably never will.) Short version: it appeals to me because it suggests that a particular time spent in a particular place might be special and noteworthy.

In a similar vein, today I found myself (not for the first time) thinking about something David Hyde Pierce (who played Niles in Frasier) said in an interview, according to his Wikipedia page.

He said the producers told him that Niles was "what Frasier would be if he had never gone to Boston and never been exposed to the people at Cheers."

That pleases me a lot because I like the idea of Boston and Cheers both being formative, life-changing experiences for Frasier; and, more generally, places and environments being life-changing and character-changing experiences for people in general.

This seems how it should be.

Another "text" that awakens this pleasure in me is "Baker Street", by Gerry Rafferty, one of my favourite songs:

Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well, another crazy day
You'll drink the night away
And forget about everything
This city desert makes you feel so cold
It's got so many people, but it's got no soul
And it's taken you so long
To find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everything.

(There are other "city" songs I could cite, like "New York, New York", "Last Summer in New York" by the Saw Doctors, and "The Last Morning" by Dr. Hook.) 

Then there is poetry as well, such as "When I Set Out for Lyonnesse" by Thomas Hardy:

When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!

I even like proverbs that evoke the difference between places (especially cities), such as "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" (which actually has to do with Christian customs). Or "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas". Maybe you could get a whole book out of place-proverbs...

I also like the title of the Herb Caen book, Don't Call it Frisco (though I've never read that one, either). Or the title of the novel Goodybe Hessle Road by Daphne Glazer, which I saw on my trip to Hull, found impossibly evocative, and eventually read years later-- well, most of it.

I guess, at the back of my mind, I've always had two "models" of time and place.

One is the model of a grid, a set of coordinates, a continuum, or whatever you want to call it. My image for this is the holodeck on Star Trek, when no simulation is being run.

The other model is time and space as full of enchantment, character, and particularity. My image for this is Lord of the Rings, or maybe the Odyssey-- and I don't italicize the Odyssey because I'm talking about the myth we all seem to have in our marrow, even if we've never read Homer.

Much of my conservatism boils down to wanting the world to be more like the second model than the first model. But I didn't want to make a political point, just an observation.

(Admittedly the David Hyde Pierce quotation isn't so much about the intrinsic character of a place, as the effect it has on an individual life. Although, come to think of it, maybe that's not true. I imagine Boston is more blue-collar and down-to-earth than Seattle, and Cheers is more folksy than the Café Nervosa-- or the real-life equivalents of both establishments. In any case, even where we are just talking about the effect of a place or time on an individual, that thought pleases me, too.)