Beyond description
US Geographer, Peirce Lewis expressed his personal geography in terms of a visceral love of maps and descriptions to stir the heart, aesthetic descriptions that provoke strong emotion and fine intellectual description that provokes deep thinking. He could certainly generate eloquent prose, “My love affair with those Michigan dunes was not a subject for rational discourse, and for that matter it still is not. … It had everything to do violent immediate sensations: the smell of October wind sweeping in from Lake Michigan, sun-hot sand that turned deliciously cool when your foot sank in, the sharp sting of sand blown hard against bare legs, the pale blur of sand pluming off the dune crest against a porcelain-blue sky. Lake Michigan a muffled roar beyond the distant beach, a hazy froth of jade and white. As I try to shape the words to evoke my feelings about that far-off place and time, I know why the Impressionists painted landscapes as they did – not literally, but as fragments of colour, splashes of pigment, bits of shattered prismatic light. One is meant to feel those landscapes, not to analyse them. I loved those great dunes in my bones and flesh. It was only much later that I learned to love them in my mind as well” (Lewis, 1985, 468).