April 26,2022
Location comes from Latin locus for place, and locations can be either temporal or physical. Where are you? Where were you? and Where will you be? are all questions whose answers importantly contribute to the story of what you do and what happens to you. The past, present and future tenses of these questions highlight the relevance of time to your place in space. If like me you’re a fan of Dick Francis, P.D. James or Sarah Paretsky, you’ll appreciate how time and place intertwine in a successful alibi to show how the suspect was elsewhere at the precise time the murder was committed.
“Locate” has a formal tone because of the way it’s used by government, police, newscasters and medical authorities. “We’re trying to locate the source of the power outage.” “We’re trying to locate the cause of his dizziness.” “Police are trying to locate anyone who witnessed the hit-and-run accident.” “We’re trying to locate the missing documents.” “We’re trying to locate who hacked into the database.”
We spend an awful lot of our lives seeking and finding things--concrete things like keys and cellphone, abstract things like numbers and ideas. Finding and locating usually go together, for typically to find something is to come within sight of it. You can find something by accident even when you are not looking for it, but other things you’re not likely to find unless you look for them. I may unexpectedly find something as I walk along the shore, but I am unlikely to find my missing ring unless I’m looking for it.
You can know where you are without knowing your location. That’s called being lost. “Seek and you shall find” is a familiar directive, and if the issue is a physical object then finding will reveal its location. But since location can be broadly or narrowly construed, locating something doesn’t always mean you have found it. I can know the needle is somewhere in the haystack before it is found.
Physical location is so familiar to us that we use it easily to represent information. Pie charts and bar charts are clear and quickly graspable. With a Venn diagram we can locate things in the categories they belong and view how the categories are related. For example, we can illustrate the fact that some but not all birds are flightless.
Renaissance artists changed the history of Western art when they developed methods for drawing perspective to display relative location. In your field of vision, the full moon is actually about the size of an aspirin held at arm’s length. It’s only because you understand the effect of distance on the apparent size of an object in your visual field as contrasted with its actual size that you believe the moon is much larger. Similarly, you know that a straight stick half immersed is really straight and not as it appears to be under water. Both examples illustrate a distinction that has played an enormous role in the history of philosophy--the distinction between appearance and reality.
Location can be the mark of success, status or achievement. When we say that Kelsey won the race, we are locating her relative to other runners at the time she crossed the finish line. Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon; all others are located after him. The top One Percent are the wealthiest Americans. Parents are pleased when children finish at the top of the graduating class. Top Forty musicians for decades provided Americans with the soundtrack of their lives, each week we learn about the Number One movie at the box office, and aspiring authors yearn to have a New York Times Bestseller.
In sports, location is a positive because we celebrate distance. It’s a home run if you hit the ball out of the park, a gold medal for the longest javelin throw, three points for a shot beyond the arc, cause to rejoice if your long drive from the tee results in a hole-in-one, and a touchdown if the ball in the runner’s hands crosses the goal line.
To be young means that there are many more possible times after your current age than before. Imagine a left-to-right line representing a possible 80 years of life with the time your birth as the first moment and your death as the last. You are young if you can locate yourself on the left half of the line. On the other hand, as the British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald once said, you know you’re old when you can imagine the next thirty years and imagine that you may not be in all of them.
An important difference between places and times is that you can often return to the same place but never to the same time. The past is over and done with—a point embodied in the adage “Don’t cry over spilt milk.” Yet in a real sense we do annually return to the same times over and over again. Human life and work are about the repetition of the seasons, holidays, birthdays, and beginnings and endings. New Year’s Day comes around each year, as do the first and last days of school and graduation days, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Ramadan, and Valentine’s Day. We give these repetitions significance with recurring celebrations in feasts, ceremonies, enactments of myth and history, dramatic and musical performances, and public manifestations of all kinds. There is a seasonal rhythm or pattern to each year, and many beliefs associated with this rhythm are still essentially religious. Without these rhythms life would be an undifferentiated series of days and months as in prison, which is why many people who have lost the beliefs continue to relish the feasts and celebrations.
Winter and the other three seasons are caused by the tilt of the earth’s axis in relation to the plane of its orbit which, as the earth goes around the sun, produces a change in the relative distance of the northern and southern hemispheres from the sun. Every school child knows this (or should). But the location of the earth in relation to the sun was a controversial matter when Copernicus’s propounded a heliocentric model to replace Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the solar system. The Ptolemaic model assumed a fixed earth around which the sun, moon, and other planets orbit, and it still counts as one of the most successful scientific theories in history, having survived the test of empirical investigation for over a thousand years. It was however mistaken.
Because human life is a journey through space and time, locational expressions are useful in planning, evaluating, and goal setting. Where do you see yourself personally or professionally a year or five years from now? Where would you like to be? There is really no time in life when it is inappropriate to ask such questions and to think about who you are, what you really care about, and what you want to accomplish. If you can manage and design your life such that the essential elements of flourishing are located in it, you will probably have a good life.
In the blues, a turnaround is a musical change-up typically played on the last two bars of a blues solo, where it makes the solo complete and takes the listener back to the top of the song. A turnaround can also make a great introduction to a song. I don’t know whether T. S. Eliot ever listened to the blues, but I think he would have been pleased with the idea of a turnaround, for he famously said: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
Unless it’s where we finish.