Other notes on bounding

Banville writes as a fictional character looking for an elusive sense of security …from the world…but more perhaps from himself in the world. This need for distance suggests a psychological relationship between island culture and the need for definitive edges to mark one's territory. Does it then suggest that island dwellers would be lovers of bounded space? Perhaps, at a different scale, walled space? That the need to bound space is based on some cultural understanding, rooted in the physical nature of the land? Boundedness, the nature of boundary, the act of bounding is in fact an act of defining. In Banville's case the boundedness serves as a definition of the need for psychological distance. But boundaries can define many things and take various forms, many of which are not so very obvious as simple space. As for Banville's ghost.