Section VI. Leaving Home.

As Casey articulated, the body contains place, is “a history of locales” (197.) Not only does the body contain our places; the self does, as well. In “Place, past, and person,” J. E. Malpas works out the deep connection between identity and place. Malpas explores what he calls “Proust’s Principle,” that we are tied to place “not just as remembered only in relation to place, but as being who and what [we] are through [our] inhabiting of places” (176). Malpas continues on this theme, writing that “self conceptualization and the conceptualization of place are both interdependent elements within the same structure. Our identities are thus bound up with particular places or localities through the very structuring of subjectivity and of mental life within the overarching structure of place” (177).
It is not, then, that I merely associate myself with the barn, or that the barn has shaped my experiences growing up; both of these are true, certainly, but not the whole of it. Just as the house is something separate yet inextricable from the rest of the barn, my identity is inextricable from my conception of this place with which I am so closely tied. The very facilities of my mind which allow me to conceive of myself, to have a sense of identity, are the same facilities which allow me to conceive of place in the truest sense of the word (those places which are, as Casey distinguishes them from ‘sites,’ “retrospectively tinged” 198).
Before I left on that November night of my most recent return, I returned to the barn, breathed in the smells of hay, horses, dust, manure, and sweet-feed. For so many winters and summers, that structure had been marked for me most by the swirls of dust-in-light, visible where sunlight would pour into the cracks between planks of wood along the side of the barn, by that familiar smell, by the sound of rain on the tin roof, and by the hundreds of hours of work I must have put in, cleaning stalls, raking the dust into its fishbone pattern, organizing supplies, and doing it all over again the next day.
Satisfied, car-keys in hand, I walked up to the driveway, situated between two of the three fields. Facing away from the barn and towards Clarksburg road, the field where we let the old boys out sprawled down and to my right, and the mares’ field up and to the left. Although it was dark, I could make out the trees that lined each field at the back, the small wooden shelters housing their respective water-troughs, and the low fences that had always given the fields their wonderful dual sense of, at once, security and freedom. They were contained, they were navigable, but they were completely open to the sky, full of grass and hay and trees and wildflowers, honeysuckle in the summer. I had learned to ride, to fall, and remount in the ring and carried that knowledge to the field, I had learned to be strong there, and learned to pass my strength onto my youngest students.
We are the sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we are only in virtue of our active engagement in place…when we come to give content to our concepts of ourselves and to the idea of our own self-identity, place and locality play a crucial role—our identities are, one can say, intricately and essentially place bound. (Malpas, 177).

Memory of place...gives us space to be precisely because we have been in so many memorable places, enjoyed such intimacy in them, known such pain there as well (Casey, 215).
Finally, I left. But, as I believe arises from the synthesis of Casey and Malpas, the place is as much a part of me as any structure of mental life is; more, because it is contained in both my mind and the place that is my body. Malpas writes that that the search for self is often portrayed as the search for a place. I am extraordinarily lucky in that I found such a place so young, that I have matured with such a strong sense of place, a place moreover in which I was necessarily actively and bodily engaged. The passage of time has woven the barn into my identity, and while I do always feel as if I leave a part of myself behind when I leave the barn, and return to that piece of myself with each return, I intuitively feel Casey’s sense that my body has stored this place, such that if I, tragically, were never to return, it would still remain embedded within me, and continue to grow alongside my own sense of self.