(Visiting) The Places of the Dead

This book's rationale lies in the thoughts provoked by the experience of travel and place; philosophical reflections about travel and self, the experience of place - an aesthetics of context. It is a book for those who like thinking about what they see. The early essays refer to travel as part of a Neo-Romantic ideology with continuities that are more than generational; an accreting of 'reaction formations' across generations (like nationalism or 'piety'), as part of (the reaction to) modern urban mass society and its ills (like the Pastoral, which with Daoism in the East, perhaps made up the world's earliest literate 'Nature-First' cultural formations - logical extensions of tribal Nature worship). The ideology of travel is felt to be a part of this larger historical formation of thought and feeling. Routes through the book might include: Geographical (Italy, China): Philosophical Aesthetics; (Landscapes and the thought they provoke: 'Hong Kong', the 'Gardens' articles, 'Mountain'); Identity (Venice/Masks, Capri), Religion and Mass Popular Culture (Guanyin, 'the Aesthetics of Ruins' I and II, and 'Manhattan' on Architecture, Capitalism and Religion).