Geography is useful, indeed necessary, to survival. Everyone must know
where to find food, water, and a place of rest, and, in the modern
world, all must make an effort to make the Earth--our home--habitable.
But much present-day geography lacks drama, with its maps and
statistics, descriptions and analysis, but no acts of chivalry, no sense
of quest. Not long ago, however, geography was romantic. Heroic
explorers ventured to forbidding environments--oceans, mountains,
forests, caves, deserts, polar ice caps--to test their power of
endurance for reasons they couldn't fully articulate. Why climb Everest?
"Because it is there." Yi-Fu Tuan has established a global reputation
for deepening the field of geography by examining its moral, universal,
philosophical, and poetic potentials and implications. In his
twenty-second book, Romantic Geography, he continues to engage the
wide-ranging ideas that have made him one of the most influential
geographers of our time. In this elegant meditation, he considers the
human tendency--stronger in some cultures than in others--to veer away
from the middle ground of common sense to embrace the polarized values
of light and darkness, high and low, chaos and form, mind and body. In
so doing, venturesome humans can find salvation in geographies that
cater not so much to survival needs (or even to good, comfortable
living) as to the passionate and romantic aspirations of their nature.
Romantic Geography is thus a paean to the human spirit, which can lift
us to the heights but also plunge us into the abyss.
