A Pub-Conversation About Place

People, or, at least, a person, have claimed to have discovered my blog. They undoubtedly unearthed it using the latest tools and methods known only to the most elite archaeologists. At least, I assume so. Otherwise, this collection of strange, often inexplicable rants and incoherent, unorganized thought-spew, is open to the public and is attracting visitors like bees to honey. Sweet, delicious honey.

Drink it in, friends, drink it in! That smell of nectar is the ambrosial delight of my internal monologue.

Or something like that. Anyway, another week has passed and it's time yet again to post. Now that I can no longer track my statistics (which wounds my ego, engages my spleen, and angers my libido--though I don't know why) I have to just assume that all my vast efforts at cogent, didactic eloquence are not going unrewarded.

We went book-buying in York for my birthday. Or, to put it differently and as my wife probably intended it, we went to York for my birthday--and found a street filled, filled, with used-bookstores. Or is it 'used-book stores'? Or neither? We bought a bookstore, but, since it was used, we got a good deal...well, no. But I got books! And we sat among the stacks, looking over old volumes of forgotten lore, and also entire shelves of John Updike novels. It was magnificent. I wept just a little bit.

We ended up at a pub--a real, 'Founded in 1504 on the occasion of her Majesty's...' pub. We sat and drank beer and cider and mead. I actually drank all of those things and went home very happy.

There really is no equivalent in the States of sitting in an old pub, with dark wood panelling and pictures of the local football teams on the walls, a few doddering tables at which sit a few doddering old yorkshiremen who chat and clink glasses and sing drinking songs while sitting on stools or wooden-backed old chairs. Through the window during lulls in the conversation, you watch the street and the passersby, usually backed by the stoney cityscape of church and shop, or scurrying through the rain, and enjoy the glow of the lamps and (if you're really lucky) the fire, and you drink something delicious and warming and you talk about life and the world and whatever is on your mind. The beer aids this of course, but the atmosphere is not drunken. That is crucial. The pub is convivial. It is not drunken. It is not a bar.

It is conversation and, more importantly, story intertwined and shaped into a building. The pub feels as though it wants to tell you stories the whole time, and being in one you can feel like you are part of a story, a character in a narrative larger than yourself yet which wraps up cozily around you and reminds you of the virtue of place. In it we tell stories and they become larger, woven into song and poem and, if we are truly lucky, legend and tale. Legends and tales understand the virtue of place--something I cannot say for modern fiction, for which place serves merely as setting.

The virtue of place is the understanding that a place has a story, or is inolved in a story, or, more generally, both. A place is not merely the setting or backdrop of a story, but a character in it, a personal (in the sense of 'being a person') force which inhabits and propels the tale. Myths, legends, folklore, all include places in this way. Njal's Iceland is as much a character as he is. It is the Iceland in the midst of its own conversion from pagan myths to Christian belief, changing its character, even the settlements, the weather, the lawcourts. The place matters. The forest of any children's cautionary tale functions in the same way--it is the forest the children fear and the forest which drives them to the witch. In the Welsh tales, it was Annyn, the Otherworld, which captured the imagination, and yet the Otherworld was in Wales. It was a place as real as any castle or town, and it drove Pwyll and Rhiannon. The tale in which the world disappears leaving ony them exemplifies this--the world disappears and yet they immediately find a town in which to dwell. They cannot exist without place.

This place is more than a landscape. It includes its own narrative which defines its personality. Njal's Iceland would never be mistaken for Pwyll's Wales or Cuchulainn's Ireland. The highlands of Scotland gave us the clans as the moors of Yorkshire gave us the miners. People and their place are inextricably intertwined, and if a story arises, the place will define the action as much as the people.

I haven't argued this in a thorough-going fashion, I know. It is more a literary, almost anecdotal plea for place. Perhaps that is fitting. The pub inspired my imagination and not my logical faculties. Of course, the beer aided, but the pub has been able to take the place, almost iconically, of story and conversation. I hope that it may ascend to the level of tale, and, if it does, as Chesterton has attempted for us in The Flying Inn, then if there is an heir to Plato's Symposium in the modern world, it is the English village pub.