That worldhood is defined above all by time. In The Ethical Function of Architecture Karsten Harries writes that "any view that understands architecture as the art of establishing place by the construction of boundaries in space is inevitably one-sided. While dwelling requires the establishment of place, place must also be understood temporally."5 I would go even further and say that a place is where time, in its human modes, takes place. A place cannot come into being without human time's intervention in nature's eternally self-renewing cycles--the cycles of "bird and bush," as it were. What intervenes in natural time is human finitude, which is unlike other finite things in that death claims our awareness before it claims our lives. We dwell in space, to be sure, but we dwell first and foremost within the limits of our mortality. When we build something in nature, be it a dwelling, a monument, or even a fire, we leave a sign there of our being mortal sojourners on the earth.

See Also Geopoetics: CI Special Section Articles by W.J.T. Mitchell, Jonathan Bordo, Michael Taussig, and Edward Said (Winter 2000) Nancy D. Munn: Excluded Spaces: The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape (Spring 1996) James Tatum: Memorials of the America War in Vietnam (Summer 1996) Saree Makdisi: Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere (Spring 1997)

The aboriginal sign of this mortality, of which Stevens's jar is a kind of everyday correlate, is the grave marker. It is not for nothing that the Greek word for sign, sema, is also the word for grave. For the Greeks the grave marker was not just one sign among others. It was a sign that signified the source of signification itself, since it stood for what it stood in--the ground of burial as such. In its pointing to itself, or to its own mark in the ground, the sema effectively opened up the place of the "here," giving it that human foundation without which there would be no places in nature.

5. Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, p. 223.

Robert Pogue Harrison is professor of Italian literature at Stanford University. His most recent book is Rome, la pluie: a quoi bon la littérature? He is currently working on the topic of the relations the living maintain with the dead in modern Western culture.