Posted by Robert Hill on July 06, 2006 at 19:00:08 from 195.92.168.165 user eclrh.
In Reply to: Re: things to see in Ransom country (cont) posted by Mike Dennis on July 06, 2006 at 07:31:57:
I went there as a child after I had devoured S&A and expexted it to be just like the books (this was also the realisation that AR had mixed various places into one). I have never been back as an adult, and part of the reason is I don't want to be disappointed again.
That seems rather a pity to me. People sometimes post here about things they've been led to do as a result of reading AR's works, but here is someone who has been led not to visit the Lakes again, which he might perhaps have visited and enjoyed but for the books.
I understand the element of disappointment - real places rarely live up to their fictional versions*, and childhood places revisited rarely live up to the memories - but I think one should try to get over it. Part of the magic of AR's settings comes from the real places he started with; another part comes from the imagination he applied to create their fictional versions; and another part comes from the imagination his characters applied to those to create the versions in their heads. If we go with an imaginative and childlike spirit, we can recreate something of the process.
--
* I once heard part of a radio programme in which someone described a visit to the island known from Yeats's poem as The Lake Isle of Innisfree. When he got there he asked a local about it. "Oh, that?" said the man. "We call that Pig Island."