Nicholas Delbanco In Defense of Quotation In the course of this last year, and without conscious intention, I have been to places with matched names. My wife and I spent the month of March in the small resort town of Bellagio; in May, in the large city of Las Vegas, we went to the Bellagio Resort Hotel. Such a pairing is hard to ignore. The north of Italy and the state of Nevada share no obvious relationship, but the noun "Bellagio" connects them each to each. The coordinates of a mind's map may be loose~edged and inexact, yet city-fathers, city-planners everyvvhere mark where their parents' parents came from when they begin to name names ... Consider the map of New England. There's a Concord or Brewster or Plymouth or Manchester in most of the northeastern states; they suggest a common ancestry or cip of the traveler's cap. Those settlers who journeyed a hard month or year on their errands to the wilderness could not have dreamed how readily we'd compass, in this mooern age, two or three cities with the identical name. The Arlington of Massachusetts-to take a neaHandom example-is but a morning's drive away from the Arlington in Vermont; Greenwich, Connecticut, and Greenwich, New York, sit four highway hours apart. The village due east of Greenwich, New York, is called Cambridge, the town to the north is called Salem-in honor, I assume, of those towns in Massachusetts from which their "founding fathers" traveled west. South along New York's Route 22 lie the villages of Chatham and North Petersburg and New Lebanon; this kind of repetitive naming is not the exception but rule. Place-words that sound an echo seem neither a failure ofimagination nor a result of the limits of nomenclature. Rather, they suggest the habit of quotation. There's more than one Hot Springs or Middletown because such titles are descriptive; the Lincolns and Washingtons and Monroes and Madisons in their several states refer to men honored and dead. Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon, are called the same because of functional geography; so too with the Springfields or Boulders or Cenrervilles that dot our nation's map. But a sizable proportion of the cities of America have to do with simple retrospect; we memorialize where we came from when we start anew. The idea offamily seems relevant here also. Strasbourg and Osaka can turn up on the unlikeliest billboards as "sister cities" in a dream of global linkage; Ann Arbor, Michigan-for reasons best known to its Chamber of Commerce-has been paired with Tubingen, Germany, J2
FUGUE #28