The Lightness of Place

Nearly a hundred years after they were born, the accidental nature of their conception still haunts these towns. Their brick work has grown old, the advertisements painted on the sides of their buildings have faded pleasantly into antiques, yet they seem insufficiently attached to the earth on which they stand. Leave one in the morning, and by afternoon it might easily have drifted off to someplace else on the prairie. Such lightness is unsettling.

- Jonathan Raban, Bad Land

As towns were founded across the prairies like rest stops on a road trip, each town came into the world teetering unsteadily on its land. Someone, somewhere else, conceived of it, pinpointing it on a map and claiming it by name. The roots in these towns grow shallow and wide. They reach east to the eager emigrants leaving Europe, and west with the ambitions of the railroad. But at its center, the town lies as though the slightest gust of wind might have it wither and blow away.

This incredible lightness of place is both a Western and Modern phenomenon. So often have I felt detached from place, from the physical geography of place. In a globalized world where the architecture and culture of one place bleeds into that of another, place is becoming increasingly homogenous. Place hovers lightly over the landscape it’s built on. It is neither here nor there, but everywhere.

In the Prairies, the manufacturers, surveyors, and railroad officials exemplified this homogeneity with the systems they laid over the landscape. They painted the prairies with a lexicon of mass-made, pre-manufactured, and imported illusions that eroded from the harshness of the landscape.

In addition to the lightness of our insignificant being, the temporal nature of the prairie has rendered its places impermanent. They have seen the decay of their buildings and crops alike. Entire towns have washed up like shipwrecks on an unforgiving sea. Their ruins slowly dissolve into the grass. Amid a scattering of ghost towns, our presence takes on an entirely moral stature. It is one that’s unique to the new world, where place is founded with ideas rather than traditions, and is cast in loose soil, beneath a temperamental sky.

But in contrast, the lightness of place has caused an immense weight on the landscape. Our treads degrade much slower than we do. And they’ll shape the landscape for longer than we can perceive. This is the imperceptible weight of our lightness.