The Divine and Artistic Ideal: Ideas and Insights
for Cross-Cultural Aesthetic Education
by
Julia Kellman
Introduction
[O]bjects transform the top of our chest into a site of memory. I think
of private landscapes like this one as querencias, places that
hold the heart. The word has been translated as homing instinct and affection.
Expatriate Alastair Reid introduced me to it in 1965, writing about the
Spanish bullfight in The New Yorker. After the first wound the
bull chooses his querencia, the place in the ring where he returns
for a moment to rest before the fight goes on, and where he finally dies.
Querencia comes from the common Spanish verb querer;
among its many meanings are to love, to want, to hold, and to command.
Reid spoke of hometowns and native countries as querencias; exiles cling
to their memories of them.
Place, "space that has the capacity to be remembered and to
evoke what is most precious," by its nature orients us to a particular
perspective, to a way of looking at the world. Each place has its own
local accent, its own constellation of habits, its own rhythm of language
and thought. We are grounded in landscape in the same manner that we are
situated in our social world, imprinted like other creatures on a typography,
pattern of weather, cycle of seasons, scents, and colors
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