inner landscapes

Regular maps have few surprises:

their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear.

More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves,

of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day - —

the ones that say

here I was happy,

in that place I left my coat behind after a party,

that is where I met
my love;

I cried there once,
I was heartsore;

but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth,

things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.

This was a good day.

One of the best days, I think.

The three of us climbed the lighthouse today and just sat up there for hours, looking out. It’s amazing to see the town from up there – it’s all small, of course, and maplike, and somehow it makes sense in a way that it doesn’t when you’re on the ground. So we started talking about that, and how it would be good if you could only get to a place like that to view your whole life from, if you could see all the far away parts and forgotten parts and parts that you know are there but never really think about, like the alley behind the Spice and Underground, or all those residential cul-de-sacs off Main where the boring houses are.

it is

We all have stuff like that, though, that is just there that we don’t think about.

Like that trip I took with Aunt Sophie last year.

It was great, but it’s not connected to anything else in my life, it’s just this detached memory floating there and I don’t think about it very often.

Which is strange because it was a happy time.


So the three of us just spent about five hours trying to think of all those sorts of memories and telling them to each other. It’s crazy what you find out about people that way.

Even your best friends are bigger than you ever imagine. Just — lots of internal landscape.

A digital pairing of two excerpts from Emily Short and Alexander McCall Smith contemplating life as landscape and the value of the internal maps we navigate by.