“The use of the term horizon is attested from the second half of the 13th century. At first the word signified ‘limit’, the limit of the gaze, the limit of sky and earth…The conquest, through the discovery of mountain landscape at the end of the 18th century, of higher and higher view-points, moved the horizon further and further back, until it vanished into infinity…
…’horizon’, which originally meant a limit, the power of circumscribing a place, came to mean immensity, infinity – such as the limitless horizon of the ocean…
Then beyond the horizon, in the imagination, appear Utopias…
But at the very moment that I look at the map – when I follow with my finger the route of a road, a contour-line, when I cross here and not there a frontier, when I jump from one bank of a river to the other – at this very moment a figure is extracted from the ground and the map, the figure of a projected journey, even if it is an imaginary one, a dreamed one. With that figure, a narrative begins, with a before and an after, a point of departure and a point of arrival, a happy coming-back or a final permanent exile. The locus has become space: directions, speeds, travel, timing give motion to the map with the tracings of various routes’
Exceperts from Louis Marin, ‘The Frontiers of Utopia’
