Genius Loci Quotes

It is good people who make good places.

The place was silent and - aware.

You should open these doors with care and caution-but, first, you must know how to close them. And above all, you must know which doors should be left unopened...

In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace- weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort. In the other drawing, the pool formed the main portion of the foreground, with the skeleton tree looming drearily at one side. At the water's farther end, the cat-tails seemed to wave and whisper among themselves in a dying wind; and the steeply barring slope of pine at the meadow's terminus was indicated as a wall of gloomy green that closed in the picture, leaving only a pale of autumnal sky at the top. ("Genius Loci")

What better way to read the landscape than by walking through it?

The soul of place is like an invisible net --or a force field -- cast up at times from within a house, neighborhood, or landscape to draw us into its labyrinthine folds.

Genius loci literally means genius of place. It is used to describe places that are deeply memorable for their architectural and experiential qualities.

Boldogság Mikor az ösztön Díj skót fel Földön – genius loci – össze Spórolt hányadát a napi Lap ár Folyam táblázata segítségével át Számítottuk és a rácsos pénz Tár Ablak alatt ki Tolták a nemes brit papír naponta szaporuló hazai ellen Értékét igazolva hogy nem volt hiába Való áldozat hat héten át a kovásztalan keksz Választék súly s ár arányait egy fogyasztó Védelmi ellen Őr gondosságával méricskélni és az összeget vissza Utunk fedezésére fordítottuk további maga Meg Tartóztatások át Váltásából keletkező többletre spekulálva be Láttuk végre hogy igen A pénznem boldogít 1995

It was Stevenson, I think, who most notably that there are some places that simply demand a story should be told of them. ... After all, perhaps Stevenson had only half of the matter. It is true there are places which stir the mind to think that a story must be told about them. But there are also, I believe, places which have their story stored already, and want to tell this to us, through whatever powers they can; through our legends and lore, through our rumors, and our rites. By its whispering fields and its murmuring waters, by the wailing of its winds and the groaning of its stones, by what it chants in darkness and the songs it sings in light, each place must reach out to us, to tell us, tell us what it holds. ("The Axholme Toll")

I shall sit in that room and see if its atmosphere brings me inspiration. I’m a believer in the genius loci. You smile, Friend Watson. Well, we shall see. By the way, you have that big umbrella of yours, have you not? … Well, I’ll borrow that if I may.

To avoid the Scylla of paleotechnic peace and the Charybdis of War, the leaders of the coming polity will steer a bold course for Eutopia [sic]. They will aim at the development of every region, its folk, work and place, in terms of the genius loci, of every nation, according to the best of its tradition and spirit; but in such wise that each region, each nation, makes its unique contribution to the rich pattern of our ever-evolving Western civilisation.

Genius loci cannot be designed to order. It has to evolve, to be allowed to hapen, to grow and change from the direct efforts of those who live and work in places and care about them...No matter how sophisticated technical knowledge may be, the understanding of others' lives and problems will always be partial. Just as outsiders cannot feel their pain, so they cannot experience their sense of place. I believe, therefore, that it is impossible to make complete places in which other poeple can live. And, in a world dominated by international economic processes and global telecommunications, there can be no return to an environment of integrated and distinctive places.

What matters is not how much we remember, but how we remember. As I see it, intelligence is closely related to creativity, to noticing something new, to making unexpected connections between disparate facts. Isaac Newton’s genius consisted of realizing that what makes an apple fall from a tree is the same force that keeps the moon in its orbit around the earth: gravity. Centuries later, in his general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein uncovered another astounding relationship when he noted that the effect of the force of gravity is indistinguishable from the acceleration of a spaceship in outer space or the tug we feel in an elevator when it starts to move. Attempting to memorize facts by rote does nothing more than distract our attention from what really matters, the deeper understanding required to establish meaning and notice connections—that which constitutes the basis of intelligence. The method of loci does nothing to help us understand the things we memorize; it is just a formula for memorization that, in fact, competes against comprehension. As we saw in the previous chapter, Shereshevskii was able to memorize a list effortlessly using the method of loci, but was incapable of grasping its content enough to pick out the liquids from the list or, on another occasion, to realize that he had memorized a sequence of consecutive numbers. Using the method of loci to store these lists left Shereshevskii no room to make any of the categorizations that we perform unconsciously (person, animal, liquid, etc.) or to find basic patterns in a list of numbers. To be creative and intelligent, we must go beyond merely remembering and undertake completely different processes: we must assimilate concepts and derive meaning. Focusing on memorization techniques limits our ability to understand, classify, contextualize, and associate. Like memorization, these processes also help to secure memories, but in a more useful and elaborate way; these are precisely the processes that should be developed and encouraged by the educational system.

A deep map is a sample swatch of the multiple manifestations of the genius loci.

The deep map configures narratives. It is a matrix of intertexual storytelling, charting our movements through the landscape.

The monks didn't like to go up on to the moors. There was something unwholesome about the place, they said. There were strange shapes far off on the ridges and sometimes noises under the peat. When they came to collect kindling and fuel for the abbey's fireplaces, they wouldn't go too deep into the Wood either. There was something worse than the wolves in there, something that always seemed determined to follow them out into the open.

But an old friend of mine in New Hampshire…” The stress she put on the words “old friend” indicated that she was talking about a fellow witch. “They said that there were indications that some of the bears there might be manifestations.” Manifestations was Cymbeline-speak for the spirit or god of a locality. What my British colleague Peter Grant would call a genius loci—which is just a fancy way of saying “local spirit”.

The term “land spirit” is my translation for the Latin genius loci, “place spirit”; in other words, a numen, a daimon attached to a specific place that it owns and protects against any incursion. By “place” I mean an uninhabited land that is still wild and uncultivated.

On many inscriptions we find the spirits combined with gods, like to the Matrae Suleis (CIL 13, 31171), to Silvanus and Diana (CIL 13, 8492), and to the Ambiomarc(i)ae (CIL 13, 7789). Elsewhere we see names that could be those of female land spirits. The Alaferhuiae are designated as “nymphs” (CIL 13, 7862), and Lobbo is called genius on stone tablets found in Utrecht. Other gods would seem to fall into the category of household spirits rather than that of land spirits. This is the case with the Matres Aufaniae (CIL 13, 8021), who, on an ex-voto of L. Maiorus Cogitatus, are combined with the guardian land spirits, tutelae loci (CIL 13, 6665), although the fania element of the name is assumed to have the meaning “swamp” (as in English “fen”). Some inscriptions reflect elements of the landscape, such as Sulevia with regard to the mountain (CIL 3, 1601 and 2, 1181), and the Junoniae (CIL 13, 8612) became, as we know, fairies in the Middle Ages, as did the Campestres (CIL 7, 1084).

In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.

The bonds joining man to the universe of course extended to the family, both to ancestors and to children not yet born. The belief in an inextinguishable vital principle ensured that nothing perished in an irreversible fashion, which explains Norse ethics: death was but one stage of a cycle, the return to the immanent or transcendent world and the return to the sacred. "Retirement to the kingdom of the dead," Regis Boyer notes judiciously, "is not actually timeless as much as it is irrelevant to the present time. It is capable of opening at any moment to create a path for returns."ts In this mental universe, which could be difficult to grasp by minds permeated by Roman and Christian culture, "the dead individual is not really dead. He has returned to one of the states of the cycle, but remains active in the form of landvaettr"—that is, tutelary spirit (genius loci). Revenants were no cause for surprise to the Germanic peoples; they fit perfectly within their mind-sets, their place has not been usurped, and we cannot dismiss these stories as "old wives' tales." The roots of the belief are too deep.

Role of “sacredscapes” in Indian culture The key is a small thing, really, but its power is great. The key is genius loci. To every place, there is a key – direct communication with the inherent meanings and messages of the place. When the key is lost, the place is forgotten. Mythologies, folk tales, continuity of cultural traditions, the quest to understand what is beyond – all are the facets of crossings. In Indian culture the crossings are the tirthas (‘sacredscapes’) where one transforms oneself from the physical to metaphysical. To cross is to be transformed. On the ladder to cross from one side – physical – to the other end – metaphysical – the sacred places serve as rungs. The setting of the proper ladder relies on a secret principle – that the vertical can be attained only by strict attention to the horizontal. The ladder provides the way of ascent through care and deeper quest. A spiritual walk is the ladder, sacred ways are the steps, and human understanding is the destination.

Nobody knows why some systems—rivers, forests, possibly the London Underground but we’re not sure—acquire a genius loci. Not even the genii locorum themselves know the why and the how of it—they only know it happens.

had also become the familiar given, the necessary condition of life, viewed with a mixture of friendliness and, yes, condescension. They were simply the goyim, the routine term, still used today, for all Gentiles short of aristocratic status. Sometimes they were — in an inversion of “our Jews” — “our goyim.” And although Poles and Jews retained their spiritual separateness, their daily culture — habits, language, cooking, ordinary aesthetics — inevitably intermingled and influenced each other. They lived in similarly constructed wooden houses. Some of the gorgeous wooden synagogues of Polish towns and villages were decorated with Polish folk motifs. Yiddish was permeated by Polish vocabulary: shmata for rag, czajnik for kettle, paskudny for odious, among many others. The peasants picked up Yiddish words, and Jewish themes appeared in their proverbs. Even today, people in Brańsk say, “It’s as noisy as a cheder”, or “She’s dressed as for a Jewish wedding” — meaning, dressed ostentatiously. We no longer know whether the origins of chicken soup were Jewish or Polish. And then there was the music. Each village had its Jewish musicians, to whom everyone was willing to listen. People from Brańsk still remember the Jewish fiddlers and klezmer bands that played at Polish weddings. Their melodies combined Jewish and Gypsy and Polish and Russian influences — that vivid, energetic, melancholy mix that is the Eastern European equivalent of the blues. And surely if they played like that, moving their audiences to dancing and to tears, then their souls must have caught something of the genius loci — the tune, the temper, the spirit of the place. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, the balance began once again ineluctably to shift. In the Yizkor Book, several revealing details suggest new winds, new currents. Perhaps the most important changes were caused by sudden migrations, both inward and outward. The influx of new immigrants began after the assassination of the liberal Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an event followed by a wave of pogroms and other anti-Semitic persecutions within the Russian Pale. In the aftermath, tens of thousands of Jews, known as Litvaks — so named because most of them came from Lithuania or from parts of Belarus commonly called Lithuania in those days — fled to the Polish territories to seek refuge.

Although shades of paganism survive even now. When the academic John Pollini was excavating in Turkey in the 1970s at the Greco-Roman site of Aphrodisias, he climbed Baba Dagh (Father Mountain), the highest mountain in that part of Turkey. Near the summit, his Turkish guide and he met some shepherds, who, Pollini recalled, “were bringing sheep to sacrifice not to Allah but to the local god of the mountain, the genius loci.” In the ancient manner, they also tied fillets around sticks planted in a pile of rocks. Shadows survived; the religious system itself had gone.