Here and there

I was reading Paul Auster today and bumped into these lines:

"A man cannot know where he is on earth except in relation to the moon or a star. Astronomy comes first; maps flow from them. Just the opposite of what you would expect. If you think about it long enough, your brain turns inside-out. A here exists only in relation to a there, not the reverse. There’s this only because there’s that; if we do not look up, we will never know what is down. Think of it, boy. We only find ourselves by looking down at what we are not."

(Paul Auster, Moon Palace, p. 153-154.)

And indeed wikipedia tells me that:
"Locality in astronomy is in theory closeness of the observer relative to the observed astronomical phenomenon under consideration, and thus in practice the relative closeness of the phenomenon to the star system of the Sun."

My English dictionary gives me three definitions for the word locality. The first two I understand easily. Place (1) and location (2). To me there is a definitiveness about “place” that is different from “location”. A location can be located. It can be defined by other locations, it is “around the corner from” or “in the middle of”. A place is what it is. It is defined by itself. It has its own rules. It doesn’t care about other places. It is seperate where a location embraces.
It is the third definition I like best. I’m not sure if it is the best definition because I don’t know exactly what it means. And I don’t know how to translate it. In Dutch it says “plaatsgeheugen”, a gorgeous word. If you translate both parts of the word you get: plaats = place, geheugen = memory.
Might it be a memory for places? Does it mean the skill of squirrels to retrace the place where they burried their nuts? Or the part of the brain where the memories about different places gets stored so you’re able to find your way to the baker every morning and remember where that cute little square in Paris was?
In her book “The art of memory” Frances Yates describes “the method of loci”. In this technique a person memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of “loci”. If one wished to remember, for example, a speech, one could break up the content of the speech into images or signs used to memorize its parts, which would then be 'placed' in the locations previously memorized. The components of the speech could then be recalled in order by imagining that one is walking through the building again, visiting each of the loci in order, viewing the images there, and thereby recalling the elements of the speech in order. A reference to these techniques survives to this day in the common English phrases "in the first place", "in the second place", etc.
Or might “plaatsgeheugen” be the memory of a place? And if so, where is this memory located and what would a place remember? The people who passed in the last year? Rain? Sunshine? Historical facts? Words? Smiles?
I’m thinking about the landscapes the Dutch painter Armando painted. He painted places where acts of war took place without leaving any visible traces. He called them guilty landscapes. He writes: “They grow and remain silent. Whatever happens. And a lot has happened around those trees. People crept up on each other and killed, they hit and humiliated. So you could say the trees are accomplices, you could say they are guilty.”