[Essay] what does this "geography" mean?

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sherishine

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(still from The English Patient)

"Nurses too became shell-shocked from the dying around them. Or from something as small as a letter. They would carry a severed arm down a hall, or swab at blood that never stopped, as if the wound were a well, and they began to believe in nothing, trusted nothing. They broke the way a man dismantling a mine broke the second his geography exploded. The way Hana broke in Santa Chiara Hospital when an official walked down the space between a hundred beds and gave her a letter that told her of the death of her father. "



What does this "geography "actually means?

Thank you for your help!
 

billmcd

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It probably means the man and his physical surroundings that is, the earth and any other material objects that were destroyed ("they broke") when the mine exploded.
 

sherishine

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Thanks!

Yet, now I think perhaps it is an abridged metaphor."the geography of his mind". The writer pays great emphasis on Nouns.;-)


And another question.

Quote:"She looks in on the English patient, whose sleeping body is probably miles away in the desert, being healed by a man who continues to dip his fingers into the bowl made with the joined soles of his feet, leaning forward, pressing the dark paste against the burned face. She imagines the weight of the hand on her own cheek. "



Is this mean that he uses his two soles as a bowl to contain the paste?




Question3:
"Finding her room had been more difficult. He had entered the villa and silently passed the half-lit seventeenth-century murals along the corridors. Somewhere there were bedrooms like dark pockets in a gold suit. The only way he could get past guards was to be revealed as an innocent. He had stripped completely and left his clothes in a flower bed.

He ambles naked up the stairs to the second floor, where the guards are, bending down to laugh at some privacy, so his face is almost at his hip, nudging the guards about his evening’s invitation, alfresco, was that it? Or seduction a cappella~? "




"his face is almost at his hip", does"his hip" mean the naked man's hip? But, how can his face at his own hip? I mean, the hip is under our back, while our faces are on the other side. How to explain this"his face is almost at his hip"?

alfresco : it must be a kind of metaphor. This word means at outside. Does that whole sentence mean," about his evening's alfresco invitation"?

Or a cappella seduction?
 
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