Place as shell

This weekend I found what I think is a striking description of place. 

In a letter to Paul Celan the German-Swiss  poet Nelly Sachs writes:

"When great weariness besets me I think of Paris and Dresden, both shells for the most beloved of people"

(Celan lived in Paris while her great friend Gudrun, who had saved the lives of Nelly and her mother, lived in Dresden)  

from Paul Celan Nelly Sachs Correspondence

Sheep Meadow Press, 1995

Thinking of place as a shell has so many reverberations for me: something that grows on one, a membrane one pulls around one, something that precipitates and binds..thank you Nelly.

out of place

"The Greenham women were metaphorically described as dirt because they were women on their own outside a heavily masculinized air force base...The use of dirt metaphors to describe Greenham women is evidence for a way of understanding these women as out of place"

Cresswell, T. (1997) Weeds, Plagues & Bodily Secretions. A Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors of Displacement. 

the place we are in at the moment

"Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other – usually an exile like myself – and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment".

Anthony Burgess, The Right to an Answer (1960) 

Soldier's Grove Bar, Kickapoo River, Wisconsin