Most places mentioned in old poetry can never be exactly located. Mountains crumble through time, landslides change the river’s course, floods wash out roads, hardly anything remains where it was for long. Thus faced with this monument of nearly a thousand years, I felt such a powerful link with the past, so connected at the heart with men of old, I forgot the aches and pains of the journey, and, in gratitude for such a traveler’s blessing, wept for joy.
Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi)
Well, there is one definition for you.
By the way, the Japanese work above, written around Shakespeare’s time in the late 1600′s, is one of the greatest books ever written by anyone anywhere in the last 500 years.
