The seer

From the latest "Things I Saw"; drawings by artist Jason Polan:

I'm impressed by the presence of turtles and bats in public places. Americans would shriek at that! The Spaniards obviously have a different, more "European" view of such promiscuous interminglings.

Symbolic Complex

As I Read about The Society of Saint John the Evangelist monastery in Cambridge, Mass. I was reminded of something Walker Percy said about places and how they are constructed in the seer's mind prior to the actual experience of seeing. 

Percy cites the instance of a typical tourist's experience of seeing the Grand Canyon (in an essay, "Loss of the Creature"). 

Before alighting upon the physical Canyon, the tourist typically has read and absorbed varieties of written and visual representations of the place. 

Thus, when she sees the Canyon with her own eyes, she is unable to have an unmediated/authentic experience. She is either disappointed with the real Canyon because it can't measure up to a preexisting image of it in her mind, or she is elated but the elation is equally mediated by the preexisting hype surrounding the Canyon. 

Percy says that a sightseer is inevitably unable to appreciate the Grand Canyon on its own merit. One sees haplessly through the lens of a "symbolic complex".

The Cambridge monastery isn't as iconic as the Grand Canyon, but as I read its representation I feel like I'm slipping into the symbolic complex already. It's as if the monastery is being slowly but surely branded in my mind as a particular place with a particular selling point.

The specific selling point of the Cambridge monastery is its promise of silence. Described as a "refuge silent enough to hear God's whisper," the monastery is then hyped into an extended embodiment of this alluring silence, a sort of silence which becomes a pricey commodity because it is in short supply in this world.

Situated in the bastion of "secular modernity" of Harvard and M.I.T. the monastery's coordinates are exceptional. Doubly exceptional is its ability to separate the visitor from the secular chatter while she is in the eye of that chatter:

People are drowning in words and drowning in information,” [said Brother Geoffrey Tristram, 58, the superior of the monastery’s order, who used to lead a congregation as a priest] [...] “Words are bombarding us from every side — to buy things, to believe things, to subscribe to things. We are trying to build a place to be still and silent. So many voices around us are shouting. God tends not to shout.

The monastery attunes one to God's voice which is the voice within.

An image of the place has already been implanted firmly in my mind, such that if and when I visit the monastery, I will be expecting to experience this cardinal silence that the monastery has morphed into in my mind's eye. 

By the way, to be able to consume this rare form of silence, one would have to dish out a $100 per night. 

Thin Places

Ethnographer James Clifford talks about "thick description." He urges travel writers to immerse themselves in the details of a place they visit, such that the place becomes visible to readers, just the way it is, instead of becoming a place that is largely a projection of the observer's mind.

Upon reading Clifford's "thick description" of a Balinese cockfight, one gets a sense of what he is saying: the details with which the famous Balinese sport--a local obsession in Bali--is registered, often makes the reader go dizzy, but the totality of the picture that emerges could be a more or less an authentic picture of Bali.

However, wonderful Clifford's advice is, would a thin place merit a thick description?

I don't think so, especially in context of how travel writer Eric Weiner defines a thin place:

It isn't a place inhabited by skinny people, like Chile and Los Angeles. Yet the perch atop the valley of L.A. from which the sparkle of Hollywood's tinsel town is visible, could constitute a thin place. Then again, Hollywood itself might turn out to be a thick place, or depending on what kinds of sights, sounds and smells have that transformative effect on you, Hollywood could very well be your thin place.

According to Weiner, the particularity of a visitor's experience of a place could make it into a thin place.

Despite the subjectivity of it all, a generic definition of a thin place is offered: 

They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever [...]Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of travel.

But one can't generalize, warns Weiner. Thin places needn't be conventionally beautiful, clean, tranquil, or fun places, thus neither the various Disney Worlds nor Cancun qualify for the status of a thin place.

Though think places, being evocative of something transcendental, could be sacred places, but the obvious sacred places are denuded of their thinness because people visit these locales with high expectation of a spiritual awakening. 

A luxurious airport like HongKong International airport can be a thin places, not simply because of its aesthetic layout, but because of the experience of seeing "life unfold" from one of the mezzanine decks.

It is hard to pin down the definition, because the thinness is an internal experience produced by an encounter between the space one is in and the totality of the visitor.

There are two places that Weiner has experienced complete thinness in: St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and a small Buddhist town in Nepal, where life literally centers around a white Stupa.

However, St. Patrick in and of itself isn't thin: It's the glow of the experience in which the writer casts it. He recalls his visit to the Cathedral with his little daughter who stood still at each and every architectural details inside the Cathedral and took photographs of them. That's where--the standing and stopping of his child--the thinness of this Cathedral lies.

While in the small town in Nepal, the writer remembers sitting in a small restaurant close to the Stupa and contemplating the life around it through the calming effect of a decent bottle of Pinot. The Pinot and the Stupa together comprise the thinness of the place.

Weiner ends by saying, one person's thinness can be another person's thickness and vice versa.