The Geography of Religious Experience

I hate to push Levin's post down the page - it relates so well to the Nora article - but another New York Times article caught my eye. It's an example of a genre of travel writing that "follows in the footsteps" of some famous, influential or remarkable person. In this case, it's William James, pragmatist philosopher and author of Varieties of Religious Experience. Apparently, James had the formative, mystical experience that informed his thought while hiking in the Adirondacks, which - conveniently enough - is a great place to hike whether James was there or not. But the historical figure is what fuels the story's imagination and gives it its frame:

I first read “The Varieties,” which was made up of a series of lectures James later gave in Edinburgh, when I was managing a fishing club deep in the central Adirondacks in the late 1970s. I was drawn by the book's title and the debt it was said to have to Emerson and Whitman. Of James I knew little — certainly nothing of his Adirondack connection. My own experience in nature had made me curious as to how places as much as cultures could produce distinctive expressions of thought and art. “All experiences have their conditions,” (emphasis mine)James wrote in another book, “Essays in Radical Empiricism.”

That last part sounds like Bruner's contention that tourist sites, however packaged, have a certain agency of their own. In any case, James's story frames the writer's own assessment of the landscape and his own conclusions about his trip:

At midnight I woke under a clear sky and gibbous moon and walked along the brook. Much has happened in the Adirondacks — even here, where it seemed nothing had. My experience in, if not of, Panther Gorge fell short of James's, but I had no trouble imagining what he had felt.

There's a longing for something here, but is it Nora's "memory." Does an attempt to reproduce the experience of a single - and not widely remembered - individual rise to the level of "memory," which once rooted a collective consciousness? Probably not, but the impulse - and the rational approach toward seeking it - does seem relevant to the discussion of lieux de memoire. Certainly, some hiking trail (pilgrimage trails?) seem to fit the bill.