Places can be like time machines

“Space and time, the two dimensions that we humans inhabit, are closely linked. ‘Landscape is personal and tribal history made visible,’ wrote the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his book Space and Place. What he means, I think, is that places are like time machines. They transport us back to years past. As Rebecca Solnit observes in her lovely, lyrical book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, ‘Perhaps it’s true that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scene of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fateful decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal.’ That’s why we feel so disoriented, irritated even, when these touchstones from our past are altered. We don’t like it when our hometown changes, even in small ways. It’s unsettling. The playground! It used to be right here, I swear. Mess with our hometown, and you’re messing with our past, with who we are. Nobody likes that.”
–Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss (2008)