Experiența Spațiului: Letters to Crina

Formidable encounters.

1 July 2025

Dear Crina,

Thank you for your letter of 28 June. It was a joy to be transported to the streets of Cadaqués and Portlligat and to almost feel the hot sun on my shoulders. How beautifully you have captured the light and shade, the almost surrealistic shapes and forms. Your reasons for writing about the visit really resonated with me.

I have lost track of the places where I decreed, with my breath taken away by the emotion that a formidable encounter provokes - this is where I want to move.¹

Experiența Spațiului - Cadaqués

The “formidable encounter” of a particular place. How true!

I read somewhere that Dali’s paranoiac landscapes aren’t so much figments of his wild subconscious but more like translations of the Costa Brava coastline of his youth. I’ve never ventured further than Barcelona, so the rest of the coast is a mystery to me. I’m still drawn to its “fetid” streets, although the increasingly hostile reaction to tourists means I may never return. Nevertheless, having visited a few times over the years, it’s become part of my “emotional geography”.

Jon Nicholls, Barcelona, 2009

Jon Nicholls, Barcelona, 2013

Jon Nicholls, Barcelona, 2022

I’m quoting your use of the phrase “emotional geography” from Memories of Politika. It’s strange how we carry around with us a kind of internal map of significant places, locations where we have felt at home, sensed the uncanny, loved and lost, or have felt more authentically ourselves.

I’ve lived in London for most of my adult life but I was brought up in a mining town in the English Midlands, a few miles from the Black Country.² Although the bright lights (and polluted motorways) of Birmingham were relatively close, my small town felt pretty isolated and, as a sensitive and arty youth, I longed for the romance of city life.

I remember my dad and grandad taking me and my brother to London for the first time. I must have been about 9 years old because my grandad died a year or so later. He’d gone to work in the local pit at 14, like most working class boys in his community.³ He was a mining engineer. I vividly remember visiting the mine with my mum, as a very young child, to take grandad his snap.⁴ The thunderous metallic sound of the wagons and winding gear has stayed with me. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ bungalow as a kid and remember him coming home after a long shift, black with soot from head to toe. He was physically shy, a bit of a puritan, and didn’t like showering with the other men. It would take him the best part of an hour, stood at the kitchen sink, to wash himself (almost) clean. Every scar and crease on his body remained stained blue by the coal dust. He died of a brain haemorrhage on holiday, about 18 months after retiring. What a hard life!

That’s me on the right with my brother and grandad, standing on Waterloo Bridge in about 1975. My dad is the photographer. He also died of a brain haemorrhage, at 58. It only occurred to me relatively recently that I’ve outlived him.

In 1989 my girlfriend (now wife) and I moved to London to live in a flat in Waterloo, about 10 minutes walk from the location of this photograph. We’ve lived in London ever since. I don’t know for sure whether that first trip to the capital made a lasting impression on me. Perhaps, subconsciously, I recognised a place I could eventually call home.

Returning to your notion of the “formidable encounter”, this is precisely how I felt the moment I arrived for interview at my school in July 1990.⁵ I can’t describe the feeling exactly, but I knew instantly that this was the place I was meant to be. I’d already accepted a job at another school, so it was quite tricky extricating myself from that commitment. Not my finest hour! But it had to be done. My destiny lay elsewhere. After 35 years of teaching in this same school, I’m about to start a new phase of my life; what my friend Vaughan refers to as the Third Act. Your letter, written in Romanian, and describing a trip to Spain, reminded me why I was so keen to begin this exchange in the first place. Apart from our shared interest in photography, the thing I value most about our collaboration is summarised in the John Berger quotation you chose to accompany your post:

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.

— John Berger

What is it like to see things from someone else’s point of view? Is it even possible to step outside one’s own perspective, to empathise with or adopt another way of seeing? As you know, Berger attempted this when he moved to live amongst, and write about, peasants in mountainous Haute-Savoie in the 1960s. Could an exchange of letters with a stranger, someone completely unknown to me personally, someone who speaks a different language, lives in a different country, is a different gender, but whose interests partly align with mine, help me expand my ability to see differently?

A “formidable encounter”?

I love audiobooks (especially when I’m out photographing) and I’ve been listening to Sarah Bakewell’s excellent At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails. It’s a wonderfully accessible, witty and entertaining account of phenomenological and existentialist ideas. Anything that makes Husserl and Heidegger relatively comprehensible is a win. During a recent morning’s walk to work, Bakewell described the difference between Husserl and Heidegger’s ideas about being and living in the world with other people - Husserl’s concept of the Lifeworld and Heidegger’s Being in the World. It seems they were both interested in the long processes of culture and history but this is also where their ideas diverged. Whereas Heidegger longed for a dream home drawn from a semi-mythical past, Husserl was fascinated by historical periods when different cultures met each other as a consequence of travel, trade, migration and exploration (before the benefits of the Internet and Substack):

The shock of encounter is mutual and it wakes each culture up to an amazing discovery: that their world is not beyond question. A travelling Greek discovers that the Greek lifeworld is just a Greek world and that there are Indian and African worlds too. In seeing this, members of each culture may come to understand that they are, in general, worlded beings who should not take anything for granted. For Husserl, therefore, cross-cultural encounters are generally good because they stimulate people to self-questioning.

According to Bakewell, whereas Heidegger responded to the 1930s crisis in Europe by turning inwards, towards the archaic and provincial, Husserl, by contrast, turned outwards, encouraging a cosmopolitan attitude and calling for international scholarly resistance to irrationalism and mysticism.

He did not expect anyone to return to an innocent belief in rationalism. But he did argue that Europeans must protect reason for, if that was lost, the continent and the wider cultural world would be lost with it.

— Sarak Bakewell

A formidable encounter between Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Schwarzwald, 1921

I can’t help reflecting on obvious parallels with our own various cultural and political crises. Unhappy comparisons with the 1930s arrive thick and fast in the news. Perhaps a renewed interest in Existentialism and the relationship between freedom and responsibility is an appropriate response to our post-truth society? Given the choice between retreating into the past or engaging with the lifeworld of strangers, I know what I prefer, although I think I understand the lure of the past. It’s a known quantity. Our exchange has only just begun, but I already feel so grateful for the time and thought that you have given to it. The risk. In some small way, maybe we are resisting irrationalism and mysticism together.

I’ve been re-reading, partly inspired by our correspondence, the letters exchanged between Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee. They are both writers I admire. I’m a dedicated fan of Auster’s books and have read almost everything except the poems. I have enjoyed the easy, relaxed tone of their exchanges. Auster, in particular, writes beautifully - informally erudite, gently questioning and unfailingly solicitous. Coetzee is a little more academic and earnest but equally kind. They do occasionally lapse into a kind of old-man exasperation about the state of things, which is a little off-putting. However, as an increasingly old man myself, I recognise the urge.

Interestingly, a couple of the letters refer to the experience of space. I’ll try to summarise:

Auster wonders about the “question of space” in novel writing and reading.

As a reader, I sometimes find myself struggling to situate the action, to understand the geography of the story […] Rather than project myself into the fictive settings the author has described (a small town in Mississippi, a street in Tokyo, a bedroom in an eighteenth-century English house), I tend to put the characters in places I am personally familiar with.

As a younger reader he had ‘seen’ characters from Pride and Prejudice in his boyhood house. When he writes, however, a reverse situation occurs in which every space is “concrete”. This allows him to believe that what he writes about is real, grounded “in the specific”. By contrast, Coetzee admits to being less thorough in his approach.

The room in which my fictional action takes place is a pretty bare place, an empty cube, in fact; I import a sofa only if it turns out to be needed (if someone is going to sit on it or look at it)

Checkov’s gun, I suppose. He refers to Vladimir Nabokov’s practice of teaching his students at Cornell to draw floor plans of the spaces in the novels they were reading. How extraordinary!

It made me wonder about my own reading habits (I’ve never written even a short story, never mind a novel, so I have no experience of constructing spaces as a writer). Do I generate a mental picture of the spaces occupied by characters in novels that I’m reading? Do detailed descriptions of fictional spaces matter to me? I’m not sure. Ironically, perhaps, there is very little description of this sort in Auster’s novels, despite his contention that the spaces he writes about are detailed in his own imagination. He seems more concerned with pushing the story along at a blistering pace, secure in the knowledge that it’s all happening in a specific, but hidden, landscape of spaces and objects. It seems Auster created his novels in a fairly bland apartment studio (not in his house) and wrote a story about a man called Mr Blank who wakes up, without memories, in a featureless white room with a manuscript in front of him that appears to be the story we are reading. In Moon Palace, the hero, Marco Fogg, inherits 1492 books from his uncle Victor which he uses to ‘furnish’ his room. He sits and sleeps on piles of books. He chooses not to work, instead reading his way through the contents of the room, selling the books one by one until, you’ve guessed it, the room empties entirely and he ends up sleeping in Central Park. Auster, it seems, loves an empty room!

Until recently, I had an office in school. I’ve worked at the same school (on two sites) since 1990 and, for most of that time, have had some kind of office space. As I’m preparing to retire, it was felt that I no longer needed such a space so I had to pack up my things (35 years worth of books and ephemera) and move to a large shared workspace. I have some sympathy for Marco Fogg. Most of my books are now in plastic boxes in my classroom waiting to be transported God knows where. There’s not enough space in my house for them, unless I make my children homeless.

I really enjoyed seeing the photograph of your desk in your letter and I was definitely jealous of the various spaces you have created in which to work. I long for an office at home but make do with a space at the dining table (see below). I can’t complain. The light is good, even if it is a bit too hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

Jon Nicholls, 2025

I am strangely grateful for the enforced move at school. I began my career working in a large room alongside colleagues and this is how it will end. A nice circularity. Also, I realise I had become somewhat hermit-like in my office, surrounded by books and other materials, slightly cut off from others. I needed to break out of this protective, but also confining, shell. I needed the shock of the new and the potential for more formidable encounters.⁶

Thankfully, my kind colleagues in the art department have given me a new space in which to work and I haven’t ended up homeless, like the hapless Fogg. I’ve gained a new perspective, I hope; a new room with a new view.

Looking forward to your next Experiența Spațiului!

Your photography friend,

Jon

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These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit by contributing to the film fund. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.

1. I hope the Google translation is adequate.

2. What and where is the Black Country?

3. West Cannock No.5 Colliery, Hednesford

4. ‘Snap’ is a dialect word for food used by coal miners.

5. https://www.thomastallisschool.com

6. The Shock of the New is one of those brilliant TV series, like Berger’s Ways of Seeing, that have had a profound effect on me.