Angela White: Required Reading 3: Americans Fascination with Space

There is a section in Landscapes of the Sacred that talks about how Americans are fascinated by space, and how they see staying in one place to be “unambitious, unadventurous- a negation of American values”. I’ve realized that this is completely true in my life. Being a military child, I have not lived my entire life in one spot, and I went to four different elementary schools, in the mere five years spent in elementary. At first this bothered me, but once we finally settled in Virginia, I got bored with living there too long. The book talks about how Americans are nomadic by nature, and I agree with this. I mean, there are plenty of people that are born and raised in one specific town, and I see how that lifestyle could be appealing, but I feel like change is a great part of life. The text seems to show in a negative light American’s tendency to not stay in one place, but I like to think of it as something that is beautiful. Had I not traveled around as much as I did as a child, I would be nothing close to the person that I am today. The book refers to the concept as a quest that is “always physically for an Odyssean sense of home” (219). The way I see it, my home is not a house that I have settled in, but it is alongside the people that I have been traveling with.