Abstract
It took a great and adventurous spirit to pierce the mystery of the horizon so that geography could stop being relegated to confined space and parataxis. Who was the first to take an eager look beyond the visible? Who turned his attention to the sublime, which opens up an area where the limit (limes) is likely to become a passable threshold (limen)? Very clever is he who can respond. In addition, how can we isolate the ancient or even antique response to this modern question without falling into overinterpretation, without falling into cultural anachronism? In cosmogonies, the myth speaks the origin of the world. It does not evoke the amazement of beings facing blank space, whose identification requires a subjective and pioneering perception. And this perception will be broken down across the mode of internal focalization.
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Notes
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For a brief, bare-facts presentation, see for example, Chiu Ling-Yeong, “Zheng He: Navigator, Discoverer and Diplomat,” in Wu Te Yao Memorial Lectures 2000 (Singapore: Unipress, 2001).
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See Mauricio Obregón, Ulysse et Magellan … , trans. Marianne Saint-Amand (Paris: Autrement, 2003 [2001]), 114–15.
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Paul Zumthor, La Mesure du monde: Représentation de l’espace au Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 227.
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© 2013 Bertrand Westphal
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Westphal, B. (2013). The Spatial Urge. In: The Plausible World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364593_4
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