Facing North: The Perennial Pull of a Mysterious Direction

I grew up in North Haledon, New Jersey, in a house that faced due north. I was taught to orient myself by standing at the mouth of our driveway with east to my right and west in the leftward direction of High Mountain, just behind which I imagined cowboys and Indians exchanging fire in a perpetual sunset. Straight ahead and hundreds of miles up the northbound interstate were the Green Mountains of Vermont, where we’d rent a cottage for two weeks every summer and see a thousand stars at night. On the highest peaks, even in July, we might need to wear our sweaters—and I can’t have been the only kid ever to climb a mountain with the illusion that he was heading north. From my earliest days I was predisposed to think of north as up.

If ever I had doubts, other factors would have kept north at the top of my childish cosmos: the globe in the school library, the blue sheen on the northern half of the needle of my cherished pocket compass, and the observable fact that houses in North Haledon were generally newer, larger, and had roomier yards than those of Haledon, her elder sister to the south. The city of Paterson, where “the colored people” lived and where I was born, was more southerly still. Before I knew it as an anthropological fact, I knew instinctively that the cradle of human life was Africa; before I’d heard of the Great Migration or the Underground Railroad, I had the sense that “moving up,” toward freedom, meant heading north.

Eventually I came to understand that any notion of north as up is as historically anomalous as it is astronomically spurious, there being no “up” in the universe and thus none to any object it contains. A cursory survey of antique maps makes that clear. The ancient Egyptians put east at the top of their cosmos, as did most medieval Christians, who saw Jerusalem as the center of the world with Eden above it. Not until the late 1400s does north achieve its conventional placement at the top of European maps. Early Islamic maps tended to put south at the top, perhaps to indicate the direction many of the world’s faithful would be facing when they turned toward Mecca. Though ancient Chinese maps put north uppermost, the Chinese word for compass, a device they are generally credited with having invented, means “south-pointing needle.” (Since a compass needle aligns itself with the Earth’s magnetic fields, it points south as much as it points north, take your pick, and the Chinese picked south.) Their north-pointing maps have been explained as an upside-down genuflection to the emperor, the “man at the top,” whose seat of power lay in that direction.

The decision to put any of the four cardinal directions at the top of a map, be it mental or cartographic, marks the point at which directionality shifts from pure geography to metaphor. It is as if, the maps are saying, a much less literal statement, really, than “Here be dragons.” It is as if north were up here. Or east, which does seem more logical. That’s where the sun rises. Shouldn’t top o’ the mornin’ be top of the world?

One of Aesop’s fables tells of a competition between the north wind and the sun. They vie to see who can make a man remove his clothing sooner. The cold wind tears relentlessly at the man’s cloak, but he only pulls it more tightly

to his skin. The sun “persuades” the man to remove his cloak by gradually heating him up. It shouldn’t surprise us that the source of all energy on Earth, a god in more than one mythology, wins out in the end. What might surprise us is the status of the north wind as a worthy competitor of the sun. It may be that its formidable power is part of what draws our imaginations north...