described the act of reading as a transcendent experience that made them feel
more complete.
The readers’ responses also revealed that in reading books (and in the case
of the writers, in their reverie of writing) they felt a veritable, albeit vicarious,
involvement in the stories, relinquishing their sense of actual place to the
enchantment of the imagined place on the page. Each new book, each imagined
place not only increased their education, knowledge and sensitivity but literally
extended their soul and seemed to capture a part of their identity in an elsewhere-
place.
(d) The Nature of Place
The respondents all expressed perceptions of place as occupying a
continuum that ranged from physical to imaginal domains, often exerting a
tremendous influence on life. For example, Reader 1 saw place as a shaping force,
something that insinuates itself upon the life and emotions of the individual as if
people arise or emerge from it, as if begotten by it. Reader 3 believed that places
have an inbuilt type of memory and that individuals feel the history of a place
beneath your feet and that to become a part of that place an individual ends up
sharing in its history. This raises interesting possibilities about the influence of
place on the individual at the social and collective levels, particularly when we
consider those places that resonate with especially puissant histories, for example,
topographies of terror, such as Auschwitz or Ground Zero in New York, or others
that symbolise both the sacred and profane such Jerusalem or Rome. An important
issue here is that of degree; is it the whole place or just a section of it; is it
permanent or does it fluctuate, perhaps resonating with only certain individual
psyches and at certain times. Then there are the problems of how and at what
level does the individual, and the collective, become aware of such influences, and
in what manner is that influence experienced in MLC? The respondents provided
interesting answers.
Reader respondents expected to be transported to an elsewhere-place but
this seemed to be contingent on certain personal qualities of the writer such as,
literary reputation, use of subject matter, storytelling technique, language skills and
the sharing of a world view that made it possible for the writer to provide for certain