The act of going outside and trying to determine whether a space is acting upon myself or if I am acting upon it caused quite a bit of soul searching for me. As a writer, I am struck by the ideas that come into my head, because those are the things that inspires me to write. So in asking the question, “Are writers moved by their surroundings, or do they move their surroundings to fit their world view?”, my answer is clear. People’s surroundings are indefinitely moving them, which means that there is a constant supply of inspiration.
In order to write about your surroundings, you have to first form judgments about them, much like Interdisciplinarity talks about. Moran talks about the Age Of Exploration, and how people tried their hardest to understand what they were seeing, so judgments and superficial observances were documented first. “The perceived differences between the Orient and the West, for example, are the product of an ‘imaginative geography’ which ‘help[s] the mind to intensify its own sense of self by dramatising the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away'” (151). In this case, it can be argued that someone who is making an observation while being moved by their surroundings can also be acting upon the environment because they’re putting words and sounds to an object that may or may not have a name, so that they can understand it themselves. For example, “The early maps of uncharted territories like South America, Africa, and Australia were often works of art and imagination rather than science…speculative drawings…substituting for lack of topographical knowledge.” (152). So yes, humans will always be influenced by the space around them, but there’s something to be said for the fact that we like to identify and study the space around us, as well.