Landscapes of the Sacred1 - Spencer Beeson

“By contrast, Plato preferred to speak of place as the wet-nurse, suckler and feeder of all things.”
Why would place be considered the wet-nurse, suckler and feeder of all things? This is strange to compare place to a wet-nurse. A wet-nurse is a nurse that feeds an infant when the mother is unable to feed the child, usually, but not exclusively, for health reasons. Another characteristic of a wet-nurse is that she would have to be lactating all the time. Many people take this to mean she must have recently had a child, but regular feeding off a woman’s breast can cause her to have milk naturally even if she didn’t recently have a child. So does wet-nurse provide a good simile for place? Well, it’s important to look at what type of place Plato was talking about. Belden C. Lane provides us with the two Greek definitions of place, topos and chora. In this passage Plato is referring to place a chora, or a place that has its own power or energy. This place is “suggestive to the imagination, drawing intimate connections to everything else in our life.” Plato’s comparison can then be taken to mean that place is essential to all life. The mothers can not be the only type of nourishment; humans must suck on the teat of the environment, or ‘place’, that we grow up in. It would be impossible to live in a world without place, so therefore, it is the “suckler and feeder of all things.” Now why I think Plato is on the right path here, there may be one thing that could be changed. It would make more sense if things were switched around. The mothers, where humans get the actual milk from, should be the wet-nurse; place should be what it is, which is essentially mother earth.