Week 4: Certeau

Certeau says, “Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by”(pg 97) because he wants to express how the simplicity of exploring is no longer the same. In the beginning, walking turned into exploration because not everything was set in place and we did not have maps. He says, “is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map”(pg 97). We now have maps that give us guidance to places we can travel too. We no longer have to go out of our way to find a good path. I think the key meaning is in the second half of the quote. If we are not actually exploring, rather going off what others have already explored, we do not gain anything. We do not get the full experience of seeing the place of learning from the place. Essentially only allowing us to grasp the surface of the place, not really everything that we can gain from it.

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I think “haunted places” are the “only ones people can live in” because there is so much history behind that place. The thought of being able to learn secrets about a place from many years ago is very enticing because people are naturally curious. People want to be able to know more about the place they live in, what has happened there before because it allows them to form a deeper connection to the place. I think cities are places that have tons of history within them, for example Chicago. Some of these events would be The Great Chicago Fire, we still have places that survived those fires and people go visit. I think people choose to live in these places because having the knowledge of everything that took place before them helps them find themselves too. Knowing there were people before gives a peace of mind because it allows the person to not feel alone in a big place or feel overwhelmed. When Certeau says, “But this sort of knowledge that remains silent”, he talks about how in these historical places, even if they are not very historical rather they are places tied to a time, there is still so much that is not known because there are things that are kept secret. I wonder how these secrets would intervene with how a person connects to a place.

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