Small children go beyond the threshold of their home only with adults: first sitting in a stroller or in the arms of their parents, then on their own two feet. When the child already walks well and is completely independent, the adult tries to ensure that the child stays within his reach all the time on a walk.
Usually young children are also afraid of losing sight of an adult. After all, an adult is a bulwark of stability, a symbol of security, the most important landmark in the children’s coordinate system. Many children are extremely frightened if this landmark suddenly disappears. For example, when an adult, playing with a child, hides behind a thick tree and does not show up for too long. For a little one, this “too” can be less than a minute. But even this is enough for the horror of loneliness and the state of mind-paralyzing panic to arise in the soul of the child: my mother disappeared forever and will never return again — what will happen to me now? In general, such catastrophic experiences are typical for very tiny children, whose intellect works on the principle that what has disappeared from my field of vision no longer exists in my world. But a mother or other adult companion on a walk is such a significant person that his disappearance, even for a short time, can quickly awaken even in a three-year-old child the infantile experiences of abandonment in this strange and instantly becoming terrible world. His inner panic usually erupts into crying and screaming, which is an instinctive call to his mother: find me!
It is often difficult for a child to calm down, even when an adult has come out of his hiding place. Unfortunately, adults do not always understand the logic of children’s behavior. It happens that a mother reproaches a child for inaction: “You should not have stood and cried, but looked for me!” It seems to an adult that the child did not play his part well in the game of hide and seek offered to him. But the child did not perceive the situation as a game, because it turned out to be too similar to the real one for him. What was a game for an adult, in the child’s perception, unexpectedly coincided with other situations that were serious and painful for him in early childhood: frequent absenteeism of the mother, lack of attention on her part, and the child’s fear that the mother would not return at all.
We note, by the way, that in many species of animals, a baby who has lost his mother is supposed to stand still and give a distress signal. And the mother should actively look for the cub, focusing on his squeak. It is this rather practical form of resolving the critical situation of losing each other that the wild nature has developed. But the child, as a human being, wants more than just to be found. He wants to be happy! It is important for the child to make sure that he is a noticeable figure for the mother against the background of life, a figure recognizable, desired, desired, not merging with this background: «That’s where our Sashenka is!»
Only what the child has fully lived in his own experience (to be lost — to be found, to cry — and to be consoled), he will be able to truly embody later in his actions in relation to other people. Only if he was treated as a value, he will carefully treat another.
Therefore, playing hide-and-seek with an adult can become a source of joyful assertion by the baby of the reliability of his and his mother’s existence in this world, if the mother understands the peculiarities of the child’s experience. Otherwise, it can give rise to a feeling of abandonment and the fear of dissolving in this vast world, as soon as an adult shifts the emphasis in the game.
In general, this harmonious unity of the interests of an adult and a child — to be mutually visible and accessible in the space of the world — is characteristic of the first years of a child’s life. The older he gets, the more he wants to fall out of sight of adults and, accordingly, out of their control.
Most of the most interesting enterprises that the children’s yard company of primary school age arranges are completely not intended for the eyes of adults and are organized contrary to their orders. This includes visiting “terrible” places like a basement, an attic, an abandoned house, and “adventure” games on construction sites, and building “headquarters”, and kindling fires, and going to the garbage heap, and much more, which will be discussed further. However, parents, who are responsible for the life and health of their children, naturally retain a completely understandable desire to see and hear their younger offspring when they walk. For older children, certain temporal and spatial restrictions are usually introduced, as well as methods of control: turnout at a certain hour, etc. reasons. Three points are especially significant: whether the playground is clearly visible from the window, whether the child will hear the call of the parent, how quickly the parent can go down if something happens. It turned out that in families living on the first, second, third floor, children, as a rule, enjoy more freedom in independent walks than those who live on the ninth or eleventh. The boundaries of the territory on which a child is allowed to be are usually strictly dependent on whether he goes for a walk alone or with someone. Here we again observe similarities in the attitudes of parents from different countries. Urban children living in apartment buildings almost everywhere ask their parents’ permission to go outside. In families with their own house, the child is allowed to walk without asking in the fenced yard of their house. The yard is perceived by parents as a «home» space.
Usually, parents let go to some places and do not let go to others, depending on who the child’s companion is. Somewhere they let one, somewhere — only with peers (for example, to play in a clearing between houses in a dacha), somewhere — if a familiar and reliable adult goes along with the children (for example, into the forest for berries), and you can go somewhere only with your parents (say, swimming in the river if the child does not swim well). All these permissions and prohibitions strongly depend on the age of the child, somewhat less on his gender, as well as the characteristics of the area where the family lives. Of course, the factors that determine the degree of control over the child are also relationships within the family, with people around them, with the child’s peers, and many other attendant circumstances.
So, children’s freedom of spatial movement and choice of places to stay outside the home is always limited and controlled by adults. The nature of these restrictions in different cultures has a natural similarity: parents anywhere in the world do not let their children go to places where danger to their life and morality may come from, and they are afraid of strangers who can harm the child. Most often, children are forbidden to cross roads where cars drive, go to a river or a reservoir, and visit specifically “adult” places. Usually the mother imposes territorial prohibitions.
Let us introduce here the concept of «territorial behavior», which we will need in this and subsequent chapters. In ethology, the science of animal behavior, it is used to refer to those forms of activity of a living being that are associated with the development, use and protection of a habitat. This term can equally refer to the description of the behavior of a frog, a dog or a person, since all of us, being bodily beings, necessarily live somewhere, walk, get food, perceive this territory as our own and try in various ways to assert our master position.
From a biological point of view, every living being is closely connected with the piece of land that feeds it and is habitable for it. The space within which a biological community lives must be large enough and rich in possibilities to meet the basic needs of its members. Otherwise, this community will not survive.
Far from being idle, but pedagogically important is the question of what kind of territory outside the home children need so that they have the strength to master it, not get lost and dissolve in it, satisfy their curiosity and realize their desires.
A conversation about what kind of space children of different ages are able to master and what they do there can be started with a summary of the results of a unique study by the American Roger Hart.
After graduating from university, Hart began teaching geography at the school. In the course of his teaching career, Hart became interested in how geographical representations are formed in children — but not from school textbooks and maps. He wanted to understand how children learn the real area in which they live. This became the subject of his dissertation.
As an object of study, he chose a small American town, the child population of which was 87 people, and settled there for a whole year. Soon all the children of this town became his friends and at the same time the young graduate student’s test subjects. He participated in their games and walks, talked with their parents, finding out where children are allowed to go and where not, where and what children do, how the area of the territory mastered by the child depends on his age and gender. In this, Hart was helped by the method of filling out «geographical diaries».
After taking aerial photographs of the area and reproducing a map of the town, Hart asked several groups of children of different ages to fill out these maps daily, marking the routes of their movements during the day with felt-tip pens. Different colors denoted trips to school, on business or for a walk, alone, with friends or with parents.
The processing of these maps, which required painstaking work, allowed Hart to establish the most interesting facts.
First, it turned out that at any age, from the youngest to adolescence, the territory developed by boys is one and a half to two times larger than the territory of girls. That is, a boy’s existence is deployed in space much wider than that of girls. And this despite the fact that, as Hart found out, parents impose stricter prohibitions on walks on boys than on girls.
This fact corresponds to the data collected and explained by the famous Soviet biologist V. A. Geodakyan. He considered any biological community as an information system in which male and female individuals have their own informative role.
Geodakyan’s research has shown that, regardless of the stage that a biological species occupies on the evolutionary ladder, «male» tasks are similar everywhere. Male individuals are adapted to actively and boldly collect information in the outside world. It means: to strive to explore this world, to appreciate the unknown, to try everything new on your own skin. Experiencing the world by himself, through himself, the male either dies or returns to his community in a new capacity, acquiring new knowledge, skills, properties. Thus, it brings biological information important for the survival of the species.
In this sense, the activity of the boyish exploration of the territory can be recognized as corresponding to the deep laws of the biology of behavior. It turns out that by nature boys are supposed to climb more than girls, to climb where they need and where they don’t need, to rush at full speed to where it is interesting, attractive, dangerous. What they successfully do, often paying for it with bumps and bruises, sometimes with serious injuries, and most often with parental punishment. It is known that a fast flea is the first to hit the scallop. In the animal world, males, like boys, also pay for curiosity leading to imprudence by the fact that more often females fall into the snares of trappers.
The “female” biological role, according to Geodakyan, is to perceive, use, store and pass on the information obtained. This «female» task is carried out at the biological level through the choice of the father of the future offspring, the father as the bearer of precisely those qualities that are worthy of preservation and continuation in children. Since females give birth, their number in the population should not fall much. If there are no females, there will be no offspring. The vitality of females is a guarantee of the further prosperity of the species, therefore the feminine tends to dynamic stability more than the masculine, and the feminine behavior is more stable, more cautious, more circumspect.
Perhaps that is why girls are not inclined, like boys, to expansively expand their territory for research purposes. On the other hand, the smaller, compared to the boyish, possessions of girls are usually more settled and psychologically felt.
Let’s return to the work of R. Hart. If his first discovery was the discovery of a connection between the sex of the child and the amount of space mastered by him, then the second concerned the age-related characteristics of children’s territorial behavior. Hart found that the amount of territory actively used by children slowly but steadily increases as children approach school age. Entering school causes a sharp, spasmodic increase in the developed territory. This happens to both boys and girls, not only because the school is usually located at some, sometimes quite significant, distance from home. The whole way of life of the child and his social status are changing: he is now a schoolboy. Increasingly, parents send him on various assignments, which immediately expands the range of places he visits, and, accordingly, the area of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbthe space mastered by him.
Around the age of nine, a bicycle begins to play a big role in a child’s life. The appearance of your own teenage bike becomes a symbol of dedication to a new age. Children actively use this wonderful vehicle to explore the world around them. A favorite activity during this period is group cycling tours around the area.
From the age of seven to the end of adolescence, the area of the territory mastered by the child is rapidly expanding. But, according to R. Hart, people usually stop there: having reached adolescence, they are no longer inclined to explore new spaces, but live within the limits known to them and do not look for another, busy with their own affairs. True, it must be taken into account that all the material described above was collected by Hart during the study of the inhabitants of a tiny American provincial town. Of course, the territorial behavior of the inhabitants of a large city will have its own characteristics. Although, as we will see later, there are many real grounds for asserting that R. Hart accurately captured the important patterns of children’s territorial behavior.
To characterize the territory developed by animals or humans, three basic concepts are usually used: «borders», «paths» and «places». They reflect the main aspects of territorial behavior.
The concept of «border» embodies the opposition of «one’s own» space — «foreign», «external», «other».
For an animal, “its own” territory is the space in which it lives, feeds and breeds. Protecting borders from alien encroachment is a survival problem. Therefore, animals mark the boundaries of their sites, most often leaving odorous marks there. For the stranger, they become a signal: do not go, this is foreign territory! — something like signs: «Private possession», which can be found in the countryside in Western countries.
The theme of man’s shielding his limits in a space already inhabited by animals is wonderfully described in the book of the famous Canadian zoologist Farley Mowatt «Don’t Scream, Wolves!». He went solo on a months-long journey into the wild Canadian tundra to study the behavior of wolves. Finding a convenient place, Mowatt began to settle down, set up tents for housing and for a warehouse of food and equipment. He soon became convinced that the wolves had a highly developed sense of ownership in relation to their territory, the boundaries of which were clearly marked in a wolf manner. Mowatt, being a specialist in animal behavior, immediately realized that in a foreign monastery one must live according to the charter adopted there. So he decided to force the wolves to acknowledge the fact of his existence. One evening, when the wolves had gone hunting at night, he applied for his own plot of land. However, it turned out to be more difficult to stake him than Mowatt had expected. Boiling a large kettle of water, he drank a good amount of tea and, after waiting a little, went to mark the boundaries of his plot. On each large bunch of grass, on hummocks and trees around the camp, he «signed». This took most of the night: I had to often return to the tent and drink an incredible amount of tea. One teapot was not enough. The work was completed only in the morning. Satisfied with himself, Mowatt climbed into the tent and watched. The wolf came first. He carefully walked around and sniffed all the marks of a person, and next to each of them on the outside he put his own: I was here — I understood you! The case took 15 minutes. Since then, all neighboring animals respected the rights of the owner of the site and took into account its boundaries (although the tags had to be updated every few weeks). The man left a message to the animals in their language, and they took note of it.
The borders of the territory are experienced by people, first of all, as the limits of possessions and zones of personal or group influence: “mine”, “ours”. In the human community, border conflicts are often particularly acute and painful due to the fact that they are more associated with a clash of psychological motives, and not just with the struggle for material benefits. Psychological confrontation often receives its symbolic expression in the form of a struggle for territory.
The less mature a person is, the less he feels his own identity — certainty, integrity, stability and awareness of himself. The lack of internal self-identity is usually compensated for by greater reliance on external forms in which the Personality materializes, asserting its presence and significance, both for others and for itself.
The assertion of one’s «I» through the demonstration of the master’s position in a certain space is typical for children. They tend to leave traces of their presence in the territory they have mastered. They establish relationships with this space, literally leaving particles of themselves in obvious and hidden places. We will consider the concrete forms of children’s ways of mastering the territory in the following chapters. In the meantime, we note that the concepts of «our yard», «our street», «our places» are always important for experiencing the self-identity of children’s and adolescent groups. Their «collective self» is also aware of itself through its master’s possession of a certain territory, and one of the means of uniting such a group is the protection of its territory from strangers.
The connection between the child’s spatial behavior and the development of his personality is clearly manifested in adolescence through the features of «boundary conflicts» with parents. The basic psychological task of adolescence is precisely the active formation of personal identity, or, simply put, the insistent need to answer oneself the question: “Who am I?” At this time, the teenager begins to «break out» of the old hierarchical relationship «teachable child» — «controlling adult». He actively strives to establish more adult and useful for his development horizontal relationships with older «personality» — «personality» in contrast to the vertical ones («senior» — «junior»). Unacceptable for him the former, the teenager notices especially quickly and reacts sharply to them at the moments when adults violate the boundaries of his bodily «I» or the boundaries of his territory.
For example, he is often irritated by the unceremonious touches of a parent who, without asking, tries to straighten a hat worn on a sideways, tie a scarf in a different way, or fasten a button. For a teenager, these actions are not only an intrusion into the intimate and personal space of his bodily “I”, but also a demonstration that his parents perceive him as a small child — a part of themselves, which is their property. After all, a sign of young children is the openness of their boundaries and bodily accessibility for parents.
Similar problems can be observed in relation to the home territory. The closer the child is to adolescence, the more he emphasizes the significance of his door — the boundary between the common space of the apartment and the entrance to his room, if there is one. If not, he persistently dreams of his own nook — a small world where everything will be his own. It happens that a teenager, proud of his wit, hangs on the door of his room a sign: “Entrance is forbidden to strangers” or “Do not climb in — it will kill you” — with a skull and bones taken from an electric pole. By this, he demonstratively reinforces the idea of prohibition, inaccessibility of his territory for everyone else, for those who are “not-I”.
His room is experienced by him as a projection of his personality, which must be protected from intrusions, since it is still fragile, insufficiently defined, it is easy to destroy it by a stronger one. In addition, for a teenager, the very idea of isolation and conservation of one’s own world is new and interesting, at first expressed as spatial inaccessibility to others. The young person will have to grow for a long time to reach an understanding of the ancient Latin formula; I carry everything with me. In the meantime, the teenager is fighting to ensure that his threshold is not crossed without asking, in particular, that parents knock at the entrance and do not put things in order in his absence. In some families, such a problem does not exist at all — parents from an early age respect the personal rights of the child. But the opposite also happens. For various reasons, parents may not be ready for the fact that another person has appeared in their family, claiming equal rights with adults. Therefore, sometimes parents violate the boundaries of their grown-up child’s home territory with the same militant demonstrativeness with which a teenager defends them. They do this to prove their determination to keep power in their hands. It must be said that in these cases, parents usually act under the influence of deep-seated problems in their own personality, which they are poorly aware of, hiding behind pseudo-rational explanations for their behavior.
In general terms and with several examples, we discussed the topic of «boundaries» and now we turn to the characterization of the second basic concept — the term «paths».
Paths are the usual trajectories of movement that a creature chooses when moving in the space of its territory. It can be a forest path to a watering hole, a path laid by house ants along the kitchen wall, or a child’s favorite routes from home to school from school to home. The path connects the places that are the goals of movement. It can be characterized on the basis of such properties as length and convenience, familiarity, safety when moving. For a person, the path itself may be of interest as such, since it gives him various and pleasant experiences.
Someone will calmly run past the stinking garbage dump, not paying any attention to it, guided by only one consideration: here the road is shorter and you can quickly get to the bus stop.
Someone will go to the same stop in a longer way, if only to walk along a beautiful path between lilac bushes, and not next to the garbage heap.
And someone will specially pave the route through the garbage, so that, passing by, at least inadvertently look — if there is anything interesting there that was not there yesterday. In this role, there may be a junior schoolboy, an old man or a builder of a country house — each may have his own interest, although they are far from the dregs of society, spending their time in the garbage heaps.
As the reader remembers, in R. Hart’s studies, children marked on the maps of the town all their movements during the day. This experiment, as well as joint walks with children around the neighborhood, allowed Hart to establish an important fact: children do not always use the roads that adults have laid.
Often the child finds his own way to the right place and uses it quite regularly. From the point of view of an adult, this path can be uncomfortable, strange, and sometimes too long. And the child is attracted by the opportunity to crawl through a hole in the fence, walk along a ditch with tadpoles, use a dangerous rickety bridge, etc. Along this path there will be a thrill, and the opportunity to observe interesting objects, and tests of dexterity and courage, and communication with favorite places.
R. Hart’s data are consistent with our observations and research. The difference in geographical location and peculiarities of upbringing in Russia and America is negligible compared with the similarity of the general principles of children’s territorial behavior. It can be added that the choice of one or another path in children (as in adults) may also depend on many psychological factors: mood, availability of free time, etc. In our studies, it was found that even the status of a child in a peer group can affect the way he gets home from school.
For a child, the very fact that he goes on his own found path is very important. This is a different, own way, not the same as that of adults, and not even the same as that of other children. The child feels like a pioneer, discoverer and master of his own world. Although formally this is the same world where everyone else lives, it is experienced as a world that truly reveals its secrets only to the chosen one.
It happens that a child wants to share his discoveries with his closest friends and attach them to his experiences, but bitterly discovers that not every person can share his enthusiasm. And even the most congenial companion will perceive something of his own in the surrounding nature. The subtlest intimate creative contact that a child establishes with the landscape that has opened up to him is deeply individual. In this connection, the child really creates “his own world”, where both what he sees and what he emotionally experiences, thinks, and fantasizes merge into one.
This problem is very accurately described in the story of one of my informants, whose childhood years were spent in one of the suburbs of St. Petersburg:
“Usually I walked home along the stream, although there was a road nearby that led the shortest way to the house. The stream was my whole world. In one place it was narrow and you could jump over it, in another it overflowed, and I figured out how to cross it. I’ve wet my feet there many times. Parents did not understand where I managed to do this, but they did not scold me very much.
On the sides of the stream there were vegetable gardens, flower beds, orchards. I saw who grew what, what bloomed where and whether the stove was heated.
I have always traveled this way alone. My attempts to show my stream to my brother were unsuccessful. He was not interested in…”
The third and last basic concept that characterizes the developed territory is the term «place». In the context of the following chapters, by the term «place» we will understand a certain locus of space (in Latin, «locus» is a place, understood as a spatial fact), where the being satisfies any needs and experiences certain feelings. In other words, it is a subjectively significant, emotionally colored island in the space of the world, which a person visits for some kind of need.
The concept of «place» is loose. It all depends on the coordinates in which it is conceived. To the question of a parent: “Where will we go for a walk on Sunday?” — a Petersburg child can answer: «To Tavriga!» In this case, the Tauride Garden will be experienced by him as a «place» in relation to the space of the city as a whole. But, having come to the garden, the child usually rushes to his favorite places. For example, in winter for a boy, this will be the lakeshore, where there is a convenient slope for sledding and a good skating rink for downhill. In the summer, he will definitely run to the iron bridge for at least a minute to feel how the metal flooring sways and creaks under his feet, and then he will go down under the dark arch, where it is slippery and damp, to check which insects and fish swim today in shallow water silt-covered channel.
Our observations of children’s territorial behavior made it possible to identify a list of places that children visit.
Firstly, these are places for games. My student psychologist N. G. Putyatova was engaged in mapping the places of play and entertainment for children in one of the quarters in the center of St. Petersburg. It turned out that when children of primary school age go out for a walk, they tend to group into same-sex companies, which are located not far from each other, but separately, and play their games there, for example, girls go to the «ball school», and boys — to » scissors.» That is, children have permanent (although outwardly not marked in any way) “girlish” and “boyish” playing places. When girls and boys unite for a common game, for example, hide-and-seek or tag, the whole group moves to a place located in the middle between their usual sites. Interestingly, if a mixed group of children played more «boyish» games, such as the Cossack robbers, they moved closer to the boys’ territory. When the game was more «girly», for example, jumping rope (two twist, one jumps, the rest wait for their turn), then everyone moved towards the girls’ playing area.
In addition, children have favorite places for certain games: it is convenient to play “ball school” near a blank wall; in the yard, where there are cars and stacks of boxes — there is where to hide; on the playground in front of the school, you can freely chase each other, etc.
Another type of children’s «places» are «scary places». They belong to the category of dangerous, forbidden, spatial zones alien to the child, but they constitute a special category among them. Usually, children consider closed spaces not inhabited by people to be “terrible places”: a basement, an attic, an old cellar or well, an abandoned house, etc. incomprehensible hostile forces living according to inhuman laws. They smell like a grave, and they cause existential horror in a child. But, as you know, «everything that threatens us with death, For the heart of a mortal conceals Inexpressible pleasures.» Therefore, going to scary places is a special tradition of children’s group life, which we will discuss in detail in chapter 6.
Another type of «places» are interesting places where you can freely observe someone else’s life, hidden, unusual, not the same as that of a child. Most often, this is the life of either very small creatures (an anthill, a ditch with tadpoles, in which some children are ready to sit for hours), or, conversely, large people who do not know that they are being looked at and are busy with something interesting for the child (window to the workshop, where something is sewn, boiled, sharpened, planed). Usually, children like to visit such places without peers, so that they do not interfere with concentration.
Children also have “evil places” where special needs are met: the forbidden is obtained or the wrong is done. The most typical place of this kind is the landfill, to which the next chapter is devoted.
As with adults, children have places of solitude where they will not be disturbed, where it is cozy and comfortable. It can be an individual place where the child goes to survive insults, calm down, find contact with himself, dream: the porch of a village house overlooking the garden, favorite swings, walkways over a pond, a gazebo, etc.
Meeting places, on the contrary, are a place for a general gathering of the surrounding children, evening gatherings, heart-to-heart conversations of a company of friends. They are chosen where it is convenient to sit, there is a lot of space, everyone can be seen and adults do not bother.
The last category of places that is important to mention are the places of existential-philosophical and religious experiences found by the child himself. He usually goes there alone to experience special states of mind. Here is one example:
“When I was eight or nine years old, I lived in Anapa. I kept the most vivid impressions thanks to my own experience — in solitude.
I was captured by the experience of the sunset, which I watched, sitting on a large tower, listening to the sound of the wind in the branches and inhaling the smell of grass and the sea. In those moments I thought about eternity, about the speed of life.
I was overwhelmed with a sense of belonging to everything and sadness. This is what I remember to this day.»
About a hundred people of different ages and genders told me about all these places in oral interviews or answering my questions in writing.
It turns out that both children and adults are equally drawn to where something necessary and important can happen for them. In the following chapters the reader will discover how strange places people sometimes choose. What drives them? Why do they go there?
In general terms, this question can be answered as follows: like tends to like.
Places that are attractive for a person turn out to be points of condensation of certain events, relationships, states that are internally connected with those mental problems that a person is solving at a given moment in his life. Usually the atmosphere of such a place symbolically expresses some key theme, which the person striving for there wants to feel. Moreover, the person himself (and this can equally be both a child and an adult) for the most part does not understand at all the reasons for his unexpected attraction to certain places. He just feels like he wants to go there.
Awareness of the internal motives of their behavior, even in adults, can come after many years. It is interesting that this quite often happened to my adult informants in the process of storytelling, when a person described the events of the past. My questions forced me to remember in detail what he had never thought about. When the past came to life in the story, some people were enlightened by the understanding of why at certain points in their lives they liked to be in certain places.
For example, adults who are at a spiritual crossroads are drawn to places marked with signs of transition: something ends there, and something begins, these are places of change, transformation of one into another, places where a choice of direction of action is made, active movements occur , flow. There, a person can feel the deep dynamics of life, the laws of its circulation and the eternal laws of being. For adults, such places are marinas, train stations, crossroads, bridges, cemeteries, rivers, the sea and, of course, churches.
Let’s take a train station as an illustration. On business, either those who have already chosen their path come there — they bought a ticket and set off on the road, or those who meet arriving people who have reached their destination.
But to experience the station as an emotionally significant place and visit it from time to time without a visible purpose, most likely, there will be people who are on the verge of change, who want to change the course of their lives, jump out of life’s trap, expand their world, survive with passengers the spirit of those distant places from which they return, etc.
Let’s turn to the testimonies of those who experienced it themselves.
“We studied at the university in the fifth, last year. We were three friends, and we usually returned from class together. In fact, we had to leave the metro in Gostiny Dvor in different directions, but we could not leave.
We were very worried about what we would do after graduation — what kind of work we would be able to find and how we would work if we couldn’t practically do anything. It was scary to go out into life, as it seemed to us, completely unprepared.
And so we held on to each other, walked, talked and moved in such a cheerful company to the Varshavsky railway station (one of the girls lived on that side). We sat there in the waiting room on wooden sofas, felt that we did not want to leave, then walked to the next station — Baltiysky. Further, our goal was Vitebsk. There they ate something and moved back: they passed through the Moscow railway station and ended the trip by drinking coffee at Finlyandsky. This insane route took four to five hours.
It’s good that it was still early spring, pre-graduation leave and exams are not coming soon.
The main thing is that we have made such strange trips to all the stations of the city more than once. Then we did not think at all about why we were drawn there. They just walked where their feet went. For some reason, we really liked to sit in the waiting room at these stations, we never went to the platform.
Only later, remembering this, I was surprised to understand how accurately these seats at the stations symbolically reflected our then life situation.
“When I started working, I went home in the evening after nine. At work, the relationship did not go well, it was lonely. The road home was not short, but I usually went on foot in order to get there later: there were a lot of people at home, there was nowhere to go, and I did not want to return there. Then I developed a strange habit on the way to make a detour and go to the station. I went inside, on the platform in any cold, I bought ice cream and ate it there, looking at the trains and hurrying people, and then I went home. It is not clear why I did this, but this continued until spring. Sometimes the thought flashed: how surprised everyone would be if they saw me here. A normal person would not go to the station for no reason at such a time!”
The topic we are discussing is reflected even in classical Russian literature. Here is the lyrical hero of I. Bunin’s story «The Life of Arseniev», in a state of confusion, arrives for one day from the southern Russian province to St. Petersburg — the northern capital of Russia bordering Finland:
Petersburg! I felt it strongly: I am in it, all surrounded by its dark and complex, sinister grandeur. The rooms were heated and stuffy … I went out and ran down the steep stairs. On the street, an impenetrable blizzard hit me with a snowy cold, I caught a cab that flashed in it and flew to the Finland Station — to experience the feeling of being abroad ”(my italics. — M.O.).
The more mature a person is, the better she realizes how an invisible map of the world of the soul is superimposed on the map of the outer world spreading around. Professionals are well versed in maps of the social world: practical psychologists, ethnographers, detectives, scouts, writers — they must know and feel those places that attract the characters of the life stories they study.
In the same way, every person who has traveled a lot knows how in a short time one can get an idea of the spirit of a city or village and the character of its inhabitants. Everyone has their own strategy as to which places to visit first. One Czech travel lover told me this:
“When I arrive in a new city, I immediately go to three places — to the church, to the cemetery and to the restaurant. There I see how the people of this city live a spiritual life, how they relate to death and to their ancestors, and how they have fun and enjoy life. Everything I need, I can find out in these three places.”
Naturally, the other person will choose a different strategy. Well, we are going to the world of children hidden from adults and we will begin to get acquainted with it by visiting “terrible places”, to which the next chapter will be devoted.