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“They [space and time] fuse into spacetime. Memories and dreams are the stuff of such fusion”. When we thoroughly went over this claim in class one day, I still felt a little bit confused and blurry when it came to this fusion of spacetime. However, as mysterious and gothic as Stephen King’s story may have been, The Reach helped me come to understand this idea a bit more. With this fusion, there is no separation between mental experience of place, and the place itself. Everything that Stella Flanders experiences on the island is inextricably tied to the island itself and nowhere else. The reach is a concept just as much as it is a physical object. This is sort of like Stella and other Goat Island inhabitants’ , such as her grandchildren, ideas about the dead. Goat Islanders are constantly asking questions about the Reach and the mainland, while also asking themselves questions about the dead (“do the dead sing?”). When Stella actually crosses the Reach and begins to interact with her friends and family who have passed away, is when I began to try and interpret this idea of spacetime as it relates to this story. Every mental vision that Stella has, whether real or not, is a manifestation of her previous, real, physical experiences with Annabelle and Bill. Yet it is still an unreality. A mysterious vision that is based in truth but has arrived at a time when Stella is exploring a physical realm that she has not yet explored. It is the simultaneous blending of two truths, and two mysteries, that are ultimately rooted in place, or rather, the experience of place. It is what Stella knows in time and space past, fusing into her present experience of spacetime.

In “The Reach,” King continually revisits the theme of the separation of the island and the mainland. He uses Stella to show how isolated an islander, and in many cases “islandness” in general, can be from the rest of the world. Stella, who is very much rooted in her own place, never experiences anything outside of what she already knows. That being said, she has witnessed the “shrinking” of the Reach, or, as I understood it, space-time compression. Still, she was able to hold true to her self (until the end of the story) and not leave the island. She never interacted with other people or places, and also never really changed her lifestyle. She was very much rooted in the island, and the distinctions between space, place, and time more or less evaporated because she never even inhabited another space. She in a sense avoided the changes happening in the world around her, molding her entire life around one, singular space. This also obviously has broad implications on the role of Goat Island in all of this. Its actual geographic location on the map can account for nearly all of Stella’s life experiences. Without inhabiting Goat Island’s space, she never would have been able to make it her place. This may sound obvious, but it is important not to downplay the role that islands can have in a person’s experience. They act as a vehicle in facilitating one’s experiences, and, in the case of Stella, can be instrumental in the avoidance of space-time compression.

King’s constant referral to the past using italics creates the world that Stella lives in.  Stella does not just live in the space that is Goat Island, the space is representative of all of her experiences throughout her life. Since she has only been in one confined and defined space, time is compressed for her. She is constantly living in memories from the past because that is the width of her experience as a human. She has grown up as the island, so her beliefs and psyche come solely from what she has seen occur in this isolated space. She relates her emotions through her experiences on the island, which makes those events present even though they are far in the past. The ghosts that inhabit the island and talk to Stella show how time is not real for her. Those people are very much alive in her eyes because time does not exist for her.

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“The Beholding Eye” makes clear that to Meinig, “landscape” is not a concrete and unchanging entity, but rather a subjective experience. Meinig categorizes these experiences into several categories: landscape as nature, ideology, history, etc. He writes of the historical landscape, “[it] is not a full record of history, but will yield to diligence and inference a great deal more than meets the casual eye” (Meinig 43). This sentence immediately conjured memories of all the times I have had my photo taken in historically significant spaces: the Greek Acropolis, Mt. Katahdin, my great-grandfather’s front stoop. Most of these photos aren’t particularly artistic in composition, but that doesn’t diminish their importance to me. I offered myself a bit of time to reflect on this: how can objectively “bad” photos be worth keeping? Framing? Laughing and crying over? Here is where Meinig’s words become especially apropos. These photos are proof that for a single fleeting moment, my story intersected with something much larger. For me, the character of these landscapes was framed not by their aesthetic, but by their history.

This compelled me to think about when aesthetic does become the predominant lens for experiencing landscape, especially through photography. For me, it’s when I lose personal connection with the image–that is, it depicts a place I have not experienced firsthand, or fails to feature a person close to me. In these instances, the personal intersection between the history of that place and my experience of the world is erased. It’s a selfish sort of realization, but I think it sheds unique light on photography as an art form. Perhaps the goal of artistic photography is to cultivate an aesthetic experience of landscape intense enough that we care about the photo’s story despite not being directly included in it. A challenge, of sorts, to overcome our own self-centered thought patterns and engage outside of ourselves.

While reading the background on Eric Hudson, I was immediately struck by a quote written by art critic Royal Cortissoz following Hudson’s death. It read, “When he died last year this staunch New Englander, acquainted with the old masters but saturated by a sturdy Americanism, left behind some of the most admirable pictures of the sea that our art has produced” (9). It was not so much the praise that he received that caught my attention, but rather the term “sturdy Americanism.” In saying that Hudson was the embodiment of Americanism, Cortissoz seems to be implying that a “real American” is one that models Hudson as well as the lobstermen and landscapes that he photographed. This is fascinating to me, as America has for decades been synonymous with development and industrialization, yet Cortissoz reverses this script and says that true Americanism is a lifestyle rooted in nature, or, as Earle Shuttleworth puts it, “rugged beauty” (12). If this is the case, then would Cortissoz look at people who view landscape as wealth as true Americans? As D.W. Meinig describes in The Beholding Eye, some people believe that “‘development’ is normally thought of as ‘improvement’” (41). The concept of constraining the ideals of Americanism to one definition is obviously incredibly complex and far-fetched, but landscape most definitely plays a crucial part in whatever that definition may be, especially when regarding “development.” Is development synonymous with improvement, or is natural beauty meant to be looked at as a sacred and wholly American? Personally, I would tend to side with Hudson, as it seems like Americans are constantly idealizing the wilderness and the people who inhabit it, but it can easily be argued that the progressive taming of nature is what has inherently defined our society.