"Things were here before you and will be here after you're gone. The geographic features, especially, give you a sense of your own place in the world and in time"
About this Quote
Kidder’s line is a quiet corrective to the modern habit of treating the world like a backdrop for our personal narrative. He’s not scolding so much as resetting the scale. “Things were here before you and will be here after you’re gone” carries the blunt comfort of geologic time: a reminder that most of what matters in the physical world is indifferent to our churn of deadlines, grievances, and self-branding. The intent isn’t to shrink you into nihilism; it’s to shrink you into accuracy.
The pivot to “geographic features, especially” is doing the real work. Mountains, rivers, coastlines: they aren’t just scenery, they’re evidence. They make time legible. A city can be rebuilt, a feed can be refreshed, a story can be rewritten. A ridgeline can’t be talked into changing. That’s why geography produces humility without requiring ideology. It’s a secular kind of awe, grounded in the stubborn permanence of landforms that outlast empires, fashions, even languages.
Subtextually, Kidder is also diagnosing a culture that’s grown unmoored - more mobile, more mediated, less anchored to place. “A sense of your own place” is both literal (where you stand) and existential (what you are in relation to what isn’t you). The line reads like reportage turned philosophy: the writer’s belief that attention to the real world, patiently observed, can return us to proportion when everything else is trying to inflate us.
The pivot to “geographic features, especially” is doing the real work. Mountains, rivers, coastlines: they aren’t just scenery, they’re evidence. They make time legible. A city can be rebuilt, a feed can be refreshed, a story can be rewritten. A ridgeline can’t be talked into changing. That’s why geography produces humility without requiring ideology. It’s a secular kind of awe, grounded in the stubborn permanence of landforms that outlast empires, fashions, even languages.
Subtextually, Kidder is also diagnosing a culture that’s grown unmoored - more mobile, more mediated, less anchored to place. “A sense of your own place” is both literal (where you stand) and existential (what you are in relation to what isn’t you). The line reads like reportage turned philosophy: the writer’s belief that attention to the real world, patiently observed, can return us to proportion when everything else is trying to inflate us.
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