Eudora Welty: Place

Place can be transparent, or translucent: not people. In real life we have to express the things plainest and closest to our minds by the clumsy word and the half-finished 

gesture; the chances are our most usual behavior makes sense only in a kind of daily way, because it has become familiar to our nearest and dearest, and still demands 

their constant indulgence and understanding. It is our describable outside that defines us, willy-nilly, to others; that may save us, or destroy us, in the world; it may be 

our shield against chaos, our mask against exposure; but whatever it is, the move we make in the place we live has to signify our intent and meaning.

*

Surely place induces poetry, and when the poet is extremely attentive to what is there, a meaning may even attach to his poem out of the spot on earth where it is 

spoken, and the poem signify the more because it does spring so wholly out of its place, and the sap has run up into it as into a tree.

*

There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood 

tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at 

all. We would not even guess what we had missed.
 
Eudora Welty (1909-2001): from Place in Fiction, in The Eye of The Story and Other Essays, 1959