I’ve written a lot about place and how the idea of place impacts art and culture and how that impact has a tendency to affect our lives. In my last column, I wrote about how every “place” has its downside, its mind-siege, and how often we don’t consider the good things about a place if we come to dislike, even hate, the negative things. Contrariwise, if we identify a place with some mythological idea of history (some places just seem older, even if they aren’t,) we tend to ignore more of the negatives that ought to be associated with the place.

For a hundred years, or a thousand, armies crisscrossed Europe like plagues of locusts, stealing, killing, conscripting the males, abusing the women, taking crops, slaughtering the farm animals for food, and leaving the locals to starve. Armies then, before the advent of supply lines and modern industrial warfare, traveled on their stomachs. They pillaged the land and the people to fulfill their immediate needs. “Ancient” Europe wasn’t a very pleasant place to live and travel.

But look at the castles and cool architecture!

The ability of any people to admirably stack rocks (building with stone) has us thinking of romantic legends of some mythical, wonderful, Camelot-like Europe that we all want to visit. It seems to imbue literature with significance it doesn’t have on its own merits. Castles existed for a reason.

Stacking rocks well is a magnet for future tourism and a bedrock for popular literature, even if it’s not the best literature.

Hemingway was called a citizen of the world, and the different epochs (or stages) of his life were closely identified with where he lived or played in the world. His reputation for being cosmopolitan has a lot to do with the seemingly romantic locations where he wrote. Only untouched Africa was a geographical muse bereft of the old-world shadows, and that is only because Africa has the questionable reputation of being the cradle of humanity, mythologically older than the stone-stacking of Europe. I should mention that Hemingway wrote about Africa from Madrid, Paris, Venice, or Havana. (Ok, I’ll give you Key West, but you get the point.)

And all of these place identities are romanticized in relation to their proximity to the architecturally artistic stacking of rocks. If someone writes well in Italy, their work is magnified by their contiguity to the ruins of ancient Rome. In our minds, we think of the Coliseum as older than the plains and hills that surround it. We think the forests and stones of England are older than the ones in Missouri or here in Texas. They aren’t. The myth is enforced by the existence of very ably stacked rocks.

The exception that proves the rule is Russian Literature, the best in the history of the world. And the best of that was written in the country, or about the countryside. So many of the best Russian writers wrote in exile, in country estates, in Siberia, the Steppe, or in the provinces. But, as I said, that is the exception. And it proves that great literature need not have the buttress of nearby well-stacked rocks to make it important. This point is evident in reading Tolstoy, for example in Anna Karenina, where the real main character, Levin, can only find peace while in the country working the land, and only becomes confused and unhappy when he is in the ancient cities. Tolstoy couldn’t write in Paris, but Hemingway could. But Hemingway had to escape the cities to find his stories, up in Michigan, Wyoming, in Pamplona, Africa, and the Caribbean.

The myth, then, is that old-world urbanity and proximity to “history” reflected in stone buildings produce literature.

And the foundation of the myth is the ridiculous idea that we have had a steady linear technological advancement from the so-called “stone age” until now. And that’s the fun part. To think that human society has instead suffered through cycles of technological advancement followed by apocalyptic reversals, that building materials become lighter and more “temporary” as society advances, and that stone buildings are really what we revert to when the previous, more advanced but perishable society is destroyed… that is the fun stuff to think about.

Anyway, this is what I was thinking sitting in my alley this morning, surrounded by stone structures over a century old.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.