ABSTRACT
In succumbing to a shattering existential angst, Shakespeare’s Hamlet asks who would bear the burdens of a weary life were it not for the
… dread of something after death –
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns … (Shakespeare c.1600, Act III, Scene I, 80)
This chapter is about the geographies, mobilities and rhythms of growing up, growing old, and moving on to that ‘undiscovered country’. My reflections are motivated by the question: As we move through the life-course how do we conduct or govern ourselves and each other in order to flourish? I want to provide a (contingent) response to that question by reference to two artistic interpretations about the life-course that resonate with scholarship on mobility and the geohumanities in which some of my work is positioned. I begin by considering flourishing as a form of conduct. In The Ethics, Aristotle argues that everything we think, all our actions, and all our practices are intended for some higher purpose: this end is, in itself, ‘the chief good’ (Book I:1). Accordingly, the virtuous capacity to flourish (eudaimonia) moves well beyond gratuitous pleasure and warrants practical wisdom (phronesis). Flourishing thus understood is both a means to, and an end that derives
from, conducting oneself to leave a tangible and worthy heritage or legacy. How people address this ontological puzzle is the subject of much work in the creative arts and humanities concerned with the task ‘know thyself ’ (Cosgrove 2011). On this understanding, I outline and then draw from insights from the geohumanities and from mobilities scholarship to undertake a close reading of two art works. One is Sandy Nicholson’s (2011) 0 to 100 Project, which illuminates some of the intergenerational dynamics with which this volume of essays is concerned. The other is the Pharmacopoeia collective’s (2003)
installation entitled Cradle to Grave (The British Museum 2014) which enables consideration of another set of dynamics: that we die at every age and stage of life and not simply at the weary end of life, as Shakespeare poignantly conveyed. Both these multi-media works use text and image to produce powerful
stories about birth, growth, senescence and death. While intrinsically interesting, here these works serve as heuristic devices: both inviting reflection upon the physical, emotional and cognitive dimensions of the body as it grows and ages; or consideration of the direction, shape, configuration, form, boundaries and structures of lived experienced in place and across space and time; or attention to scale, for example by reference to ideas of lives well-lived in proportion and degree and, indeed, justly. My aim in relation to these works is to draw out and mobilise their geographical imaginaries to reflect on questions about the life-course, flourishing and conduct.
