Up@dawn 2.0

Monday, July 31, 2017

Week 9 - Post 8 Walking and Life's Big Questions


Two birds with one stone…so to speak. The Adam Gopnik article combined with the question:

  • Do you think a deeper understanding of evolution would bring us closer to "the answers to life's big questions" (assuming the answer is probably not "42")? What are some of those questions? 

The two go hand-in-hand. What better time to think about life’s big questions than while walking…in silence without earbuds. Gopnik’s article deals primarily with city walking and the closeness the walkers have with their environment. The article mentions using a Walkman or iPhone to drown out the traffic noise. In some respects, the two men become one with the city. They love the city. They also seem to love the city people they meet as they walk.

I haven’t done a search, but I bet someone has written a similar article about walking in small towns, rural areas, national and state parks, and wilderness areas. The Walls of Jericho, Stone Door, and Savage Falls come to mind. I used to walk these places before they became popular destinations for nature lovers, before the days of Walkman and iPhones. There is something about clean air, blue skies, and the sounds of nature that help one maneuver through the maze of thoughts and come to reasonable and logical conclusions concerning things of difficulty. It is of no significance if those things are matters of the heart or matters of science. The solitude of walking through God’s creation, alone or with your dog, helps bring clarity of mind, mental acuity and it helps to sort out and evaluate “the answers to life’s big questions.” It helps one to focus on the important things of life and many times it will bring understanding.

Most people will agree the three big questions of life are: 1) Where did I come from? 2) Why am I here? 3) Where am I going? If the first one can be answered, the other two answer themselves. These are questions that everyone asks themselves at some point in their lives, but there are few people who actually explore the questions in depth. It has been said that most people don’t want to take the time to investigate the scientific evidence for evolution or for God. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to the answers. They require study. They also require detaching one’s self from any emotional connection to preconceived notions and inherited beliefs. It requires a person to challenge everything, including conventional wisdom. It might require one to leave the herd and become an independent thinker.

The answer then, is yes. A deeper understanding of the science behind the theory of evolution would bring us closer to "the answers to life's big questions." An examination of both sides of the debate would reveal much.

Friday, July 28, 2017

In conclusion...

I've enjoyed our conversation this summer, and am looking forward to your final posts. It feels too soon for finals words in our short course. Maybe it's always too soon for final words, period. That was in fact William James's borrowed final word, in an essay that appeared shortly before his death in the summer of 1910:
“Ever not quite!”— this seems to wring the very last panting word out of rationalistic philosophy’s mouth. It is fit to be pluralism’s heraldic device. There is no complete generalization, no total point of view, no all-pervasive unity, but everywhere some residual resistance to verbalization, formulation, and discursification, some genius of reality that escapes from the pressure of the logical finger, that says “hands off,” and claims its privacy, and means to be left to its own life. In every moment of immediate experience is somewhat absolutely original and novel. “We are the first that ever burst into this silent sea.” Philosophy must pass from words, that reproduce but ancient elements, to life itself, that gives the integrally new. The “inexplicable,” the “mystery,” as what the intellect, with its claim to reason out reality, thinks that it is in duty bound to resolve, and the resolution of which Blood’s revelation would eliminate from the sphere of our duties, remains; but it remains as something to be met and dealt with by faculties more akin to our activities and heroisms and willingnesses, than to our logical powers. This is the anesthetic insight, according to our author. Let my last word, then, speaking in the name of intellectual philosophy, be his word. —“There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given. — Farewell!”
So, no conclusion. To the endless conversation!

Thursday, July 27, 2017

"Love Henry James: The Master"

From BBC Radio 4 - listen here...

Witty, wise and the best women in literature. So why doesn't Henry James inspire the widespread devotion that Jane Austen and the Brontës bask in? Sarah Churchwell is on a mission to solve that mystery and turn readers on to the limitless charms of the Father of the modern novel.

With the help of 'Brooklyn' and 'House of Names' author, Colm Tóibín and literary biographer Hermione Lee, Sarah will showcase the very best of his work and prove that James isn't just an 'important' novelist but a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Image result for love henry james

As an American who travelled through Europe and took up British citizenship during the First World War, James was well-placed to chronicle the shifting relationships between the continents. Americans, by turns naïve or arrogant, clash time and again with stubborn Brits and wily Continentals. In an age of Drumpf and Brexit his penetrating gaze and snarky asides are needed more than ever.

But it's Henry's women that keep bringing film-makers and fans to his work. No male novelist before or since has spent an entire career faithfully placing himself within the consciousness of women. Alone amongst the great men of Victorian and Edwardian literature he assumed that a woman could feel as he did and experience the same powerful drive to act. Those wishes, however, are again and again thwarted by the constraints of society and the moral sense of his characters.

As a curtain-raiser to a season of Henry James dramas on BBC Radio Four Sarah Churchwell reassesses those great characters and offers up their magnetic attraction and fatal flaws for the new audience that he so richly deserves.

Final post

Final post due no later than Friday,August 11: 1,000+ words on the relevant Anglo-American topic of your choice. My suggestion: select an additional text, possibly one mentioned on the syllabus or in one of my subsequent posts, or one that you've come across independently, and give us a book report/critique. Try to relate it to as many of our texts, topics, and discussion threads as you can. Remember, a blog post is a less formally constraining medium than a conventional term paper. Have fun with the medium: include links, graphics, videos etc. Also include a final tally of how many runs you're claiming for the summer. Comment on classmates' final posts (remember, each comment is a base & every four bases is another run).

Alternate final post suggestion: convene an imaginary round-table discussion with the Jameses, Mill, Darwin, and yourself as moderator. Transcribe the proceedings, posing any discussion questions you like. (If I were moderating, though, I might begin by asking each of them to say what "experience" means to them, and what its significance is in their respective worldviews and philosophies-particularly the variable experience of distinct individuals.) You may use actual quotations and your imagination to fashion the dialogue you think they might have with you (if quoting directly, be sure to provide sources or links to sources). A good template might be the old "Meeting of Minds" series.

Again: have fun!

(And don't forget to comment on your classmates' posts, & include your tally of total runs.)

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Aldous Huxley

Today is the birthday of Darwin's Bulldog's grandson, who had unflattering things to say about Americans (* below)...

Image result for th huxley and aldous huxley Image result for th huxley and aldous huxley

English author Aldous Huxley (books by this author), born in Godalming, Surrey, in 1894. He was born into a family of intellectuals, writers, and scientists: his father was a poet and biographer; two of his brothers became respected biologists; and his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a famous biologist and naturalist who received the nickname "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defense of the theory of evolution. On his mother's side, Huxley was related to the novelist Mary Humphry Ward, the poet Matthew Arnold, and famous educator Thomas Arnold. Even among these luminaries, Huxley was gifted, alert, and intelligent.

Huxley lost his mother to cancer when he was 14 years old. Two years later, when he was a student at Eton, he suffered an illness that left him almost completely blind. A blind man couldn't be a scientist. A blind man couldn't be a soldier, either, so Huxley stayed home while many of his peers went off to fight in World War I. Huxley had to rethink his career aspirations. He turned instead to literature, and studied at Oxford, where he met and befriended D.H. Lawrence. In 1916, Huxley published his first book — a collection of poems.

He married Maria Nys in 1919, and the couple traveled a lot during the early years of their marriage. In his book Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday (1926), Huxley wrote about the people and cultures they encountered on their travels. *He liked the vitality and energy of the Americans they met, but he thought that energy was wasted on mindless pursuits. "Nowhere, perhaps, is there so little conversation [...] It is all movement and noise, like the water gurgling out of the bath — down the waste. Yes, down the waste."
Huxley published four novels in the 1920s, including Crome Yellow (1921) and Point Counter Point (1928), as well as numerous essays, poems, plays, and six books of stories. And in 1931, he began work on a novel that he intended to be a light look at what the future might hold — a satiric response to the utopian novels of H.G. Wells. He wrote the book in four months. It was Brave New World (1932), and it ended up being a darker book than he'd planned. The book is set in London in the year 2540, a future where society functions like one of Henry Ford's assembly lines. People are genetically engineered and mass-produced in hatcheries. They're fed a steady diet of antidepressants, amusements, and sex to keep them complacent. When George Orwell's dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four came out in 1948, people liked to compare the two and argue about which bleak future was more likely to happen. Huxley defended his vision, saying it would be easier to control people through pleasure than through fear. WA

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

American Heathen

I have a confession to make to my classmates. I love graphic novels and I am not ashamed to tell the world. Graphic novels are literary works of art on par with other works of literature. Literature is meant to tell a story and graphic novels do just that. They just do it in a different lane. A lane that speaks to the individuality of the artists. I believe that William James and John Stuart Mill would approve of these lanes.

For anyone who is against graphic novels, then an argument can be made that you do not like movies or television. Blasphemy, you say? Stay with me for a moment. I will attempt to show you the light. In order for your favorite TV shows or movies come to life, they must be created. Part of that creation process is the creation of storyboards that help bring the ideas of the director to life. Now those story boards might not seem like a big deal, but they are, in fact, a huge deal. They help shape and direct the evolution of these visual mediums.

Is that not enough for you? How about the fact that the movies and TV shows of today are increasingly based upon graphic novels. TV networks, such as ABC, AMC and the CW are raking in millions of dollars in ad revenue from their productions of graphic novels. I know that you are watching 'The Walking Dead," "Preacher," "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., " and "The Flash." I checked the ratings. I also know that you are running out to see every Marvel and D.C. comics adapted movie that comes out in theaters. I checked those ratings as well.

The 15 Best Hip-Hop Comics




Why Walking Helps Us Think

In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.

Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”

In a series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated. Another experiment required volunteers to contemplate a metaphor, such as “a budding cocoon,” and generate a unique but equivalent metaphor, such as “an egg hatching.” Ninety-five per cent of students who went for a walk were able to do so, compared to only fifty per cent of those who never stood up. But walking actually worsened people’s performance on a different type of test, in which students had to find the one word that united a set of three, like “cheese” for “cottage, cream, and cake.” Oppezzo speculates that, by setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought, walking is counterproductive to such laser-focussed thinking: “If you’re looking for a single correct answer to a question, you probably don’t want all of these different ideas bubbling up.”

Where we walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mental resources that man-made environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded intersection—rife with pedestrians, cars, and billboards—bats our attention around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to rustling reeds.

Still, urban and pastoral walks likely offer unique advantages for the mind. A walk through a city provides more immediate stimulation—a greater variety of sensations for the mind to play with. But, if we are already at the brink of overstimulation, we can turn to nature instead. Woolf relished the creative energy of London’s streets, describing it in her diary as “being on the highest crest of the biggest wave, right in the centre & swim of things.” But she also depended on her walks through England’s South Downs to “have space to spread my mind out in.” And, in her youth, she often travelled to Cornwall for the summer, where she loved to “spend my afternoons in solitary trampling” through the countryside.

Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps. Ferris Jabr, New Yorker



HEAVEN’S GAITS
What we do when we walk. By Adam Gopnik

Why people walk is a hard question that looks easy. Upright bipedalism seems such an obvious advantage from the viewpoint of those already upright that we rarely see its difficulty. In the famous diagram, Darwinian man unfolds himself from frightened crouch to strong surveyor of the ages, and it looks like a natural ascension: you start out bending over, knuckles dragging, timidly scouring the ground for grubs, then you slowly straighten up until there you are, staring at the skies and counting the stars and thinking up gods to rule them. But the advantages of walking have actually been tricky to calculate. One guess among the evolutionary biologists has been that a significant advantage may simply be that walking on two legs frees up your hands to throw rocks at what might become your food—or to throw rocks at other bipedal creatures who are throwing rocks at what might become their food. Although walking upright seems to have preceded throwing rocks, the rock throwing, the biologists point out, is rarer than the bipedalism alone, which we share with all the birds, including awkward penguins and ostriches, and with angry bears. Meanwhile, the certainty of human back pain, like the inevitability of labor pains, is evidence of the jury-rigged, best-solution-at-hand nature of evolution.

Over time, though, things we do for a purpose, however obscure in origin, become things we do for pleasure, particularly when we no longer have to do them. As we do them for pleasure, they get attached either to a philosophy or to the pursuit of some profit. Two new accounts of this process have recently appeared, and although they occasionally make you want to throw things, they both illuminate what it means to be a pedestrian in the modern world.

Matthew Algeo’s “Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Spectator Sport” (Chicago Review) is one of those books which open up a forgotten world so fully that at first the reader wonders, just a little, if his leg is being pulled. How could there be an account this elaborate—illustrated with sober handbills, blaring headlines, starchy portrait photographs, and racy newspaper cartoons—of an enthusiasm this unknown? But it all happened. For several decades in the later nineteenth century, the favorite spectator sport in America was watching people walk in circles inside big buildings.

The story Algeo tells begins in 1860, at the start of the Civil War, when a New Englander named Edward Payson Weston made a facetious bet with a friend that, if Lincoln won the Presidential election, he would walk all the way from the State House in Boston to the unfinished Capitol, in Washington, in ten days. Lincoln won, and, ten days before the inaugural, Weston set off. Though he didn’t get there quite in time, his progress, chronicled by the newspapers, enthralled a nation in need of some small fun, and he became an improbable American hero, a kind of Lindbergh of the corns and calluses. Liking his new celebrity, and the money it brought, Weston decided to keep a good thing going and, when the war ended, began to engage in competitive, six-day (never on Sunday) walking marathons in Chicago, New York, and, eventually, London.


For the next two decades, while baseball burbled around the amateur edges and boxing went on in the shadows, walking really was the dominant spectator sport in America, and Weston its central figure. He had the brains to adopt a singular and consistent costume, a gentleman’s gear of hunting trousers, boots, and riding crop. In time, a poor Irish immigrant to America, Daniel O’Leary, emerged as his opposite in style, and so his great rival; together, they staged walking races, symbolic class contests, immigrant vs. native, over several long sessions in several big towns. O’Leary was, in a Jackie Robinson-like way, perceived as a credit to his race, restoring the honor of the Irish, stained most recently, in Chicago, by the episode of another O’Leary and her cow. Working-class enthusiasm for the contests was so keen that indoor stadiums were needed. In New York, P. T. Barnum’s Roman Hippodrome, in the East Twenties, got covered, first by a tent and then, soon afterward, by a real roof, in part to contain and show off the walking marathons. (Eventually, that Hippodrome evolved into the original, sadly lost Madison Square Garden, where walkers walked, and where, in 1879, Weston, freshly returned from his London exploits, was given a hero’s welcome.)

The sport was surprisingly open to the talents. There were African-American walkers—the real Jackie Robinson of the sport was one Frank Hart, who was a protégé of O’Leary’s and therefore called Black Dan—and there were even legendary women walkers, like Ada Anderson, who trained in Wales and then took a boat to America to walk for cash. Walkers were the first mass-culture sports stars: when a tobacco company inserted trading cards into cigarette packs, what the cards showed was pictures of the walkers. O’Leary, after a London contest, returned to his home town in Ireland and received a hero’s welcome of his own.

What accounts for the popularity of watching folks walk for long days? Algeo, discussing the moment when the craze took off in Chicago, first suggests that walking ruled because there was nothing much else for the working classes to attend. But then we are on to England, where the sport is for a time every bit as popular, and, while there may not have been much cheap popular theatre or music hall for the working classes to go to in Chicago, there surely was a lot of it in London. The truth is that many waves sweep mass society that have no more explanation than the oceanic kind: a random blast of wind drives a swell, it snags on a rock, and then the wave crashes. By the late eighteen-seventies, walking had started getting ferocious hate mail, or sermons, chiefly from New York City preachers, who thundered against it as a “gladiatorial” sport. Soon there was legislation, still on the books, prohibiting six-day walking marathons.

The contests, one comes to see, were no longer really walking competitions. Mostly, they were, or became, something crueller. They were competitions in not sleeping. The ability to walk well—to have Weston’s odd big stride or O’Leary’s right light step—had surrendered to the more brutal ability just to stay awake for six days. (Weston eventually admitted to having chewed coca leaves while racing, although, Barry Bonds-like, he strenuously denied that the drug really helped.) The crowds were not coming to watch the walkers walk. They were coming to watch them drop.

Competitive walking, in its maturity, turns out to be less a charming game from an age of innocence than one more episode in the modern fascination with rituals of human endurance, made exotic by technological advance, and fuelled by the same morbid curiosity that gives us the demolition derby, books about survival on Everest, and the ice-bound stunts of David Blaine, along with “Survivor” and “Deadliest Catch.” Our appetite for watching people stumble from exhaustion soon moves from one kind of spectacle to the next, perhaps partly because we’re ashamed of having enjoyed the previous one. This may also explain why each one, when it goes, can leave so little track behind. We keep our eyes fixed on the horizon to avoid having to look back over our shoulder in embarrassment.

“Walking is not a sport,” Frédéric Gros announces, in the very first, single-sentence paragraph of his new book, “A Philosophy of Walking” (translated from the French by John Howe; Verso), already a best-seller abroad. “But what about Weston and O’Leary and Anderson?” the newly instructed reader wants to shout. No dice. Gros is a professor of philosophy at a French university—at the finest of French universities, the University of Paris XII, and also at the great Sciences Po—and if you did not know this in advance you would not have to read much of his book to guess that it was so. He is not the kind willing to make even a minimal Google search (“Sport promenade histoire”) before writing. Instead of historical argument supported by evidence, or chronicle illuminated by interpretation, he gives us oracular assertion, supported by more oracular assertion. In this game, it is batting average that counts: if four out of ten of your oracular assertions are arresting oracular assertions, you’re golden.

And many of Gros’s oracular assertions are arresting; if they don’t exactly stop you in your tracks, they slow your leap to certainties. The purpose of walking, he tells us, is not to find friends but to share solitude, “for solitude too can be shared, like bread and daylight”; the philosopher Kant’s life “was as exactly ruled as music manuscript paper”; when walking, the body “stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape.” And so on. [cartoon id="a18433"]

Gros’s larger theory of walking, abstracted from all the abstractions, is that there are three essential kinds. There is the root case of contemplative walking (what you do to clear your head). There is “cynical” walking (the term referring to the Cynics of ancient Greece, homeless hippies who scorned conventions, customs, clothes). And then there is the composite contemplative-cynic, the modern city walker (what is often called the “flâneur”). Gros’s thesis is that the three kinds, developed over time, can now coexist, although, no surprise, the commodifications of capitalism make that coexistence hard.

Contemplative walking is Gros’s favored kind: the walking of medieval pilgrims, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau, of Kant’s daily life. It is the Western equivalent of what Asians accomplish by sitting. Walking is the Western form of meditation: “You’re doing nothing when you walk, nothing but walking. But having nothing to do but walk makes it possible to recover the pure sensation of being, to rediscover the simple joy of existing, the joy that permeates the whole of childhood.” There’s a reason, Gros suggests, that a dominant school of philosophy in the ancient world, revived in the medieval, was called the “peripatetic.” In Raphael’s great fresco of assembled ancient philosophers, conventionally called “The School of Athens,” Plato and Aristotle are shown upright and in movement, peripatetic even when fixed in place by paint, advancing toward the other philosophers rather than enthroned above them. Movement and mind are linked in Western thought.

The Cynic philosophers of antiquity, in contrast, were often merely “circumambulant”—walking around and around the same few blocks in order to annoy other people. “All the commonplace compromises and conventions were booed, mocked, dragged through the mud,” Gros writes. “The Cynics’ philosophy is linked with the condition of the walker by far more than the superficial impression of rootlessness: the dimensions of experience inherent in those great peregrinations become dynamite when imported into towns.”

From these two begetters, contemplative country hikers and argumentative city schleppers, all other walking descends. The kind of modern city walking that we associate with the flâneur—the nineteenth-century city walking of Baudelaire and Manet, which Walter Benjamin later apotheosized—combines the contemplative walker’s escape from self-consciousness and inner noise with the Cynic’s attempted escape from social roles. The flâneur represents cynicism, but clothed and housed and only sporadically committed.

Gros’s horizons, though they contain some American writers (including, puzzlingly, Jack Kerouac, the echt American driver), are narrowly Parisian. He mentions none of the great New York walkers, from Walt Whitman to Alfred Kazin, let alone the striders in Madison Square Garden, nor does he quote any of the great New York walking books. Is there a peculiarly New York addition to the meanings of walking? Rereading the New York walkers, you find one note that eluded the cynic-contemplatives of Paris: in New York, walking, even without companions, can still be an expression of companionship, of expansive connection; a happy opening out to an enlarged civic self rather than a narrowing down to a contemplative inner one; a way of scooting toward the American Over-Soul, in sneakers.

It starts with Walt. Where the Parisian poet-walkers of his time walk to take it all apart, dissect the scene, find the skull beneath the street lamps, Whitman walks to get it all in, see what’s up, get the life of the city right. Walking in New York, Whitman says, leaves him “enrich’d of soul, you give me forever faces.” Whitman is always walking through the city. “Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,” he tells us of his walks, and “I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,” which says something about the state of the waters then. Making his way down the streets, leaping into the Hudson: those are Whitman’s promenades. He seeks not a glimpse inside his own mind but connection: “Manhattan crowds, with their turbulent musical chorus! / Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.” This makes him a man of buses and boats and bridges as much as of boulevards; his New York is as much Brooklyn as it is Manhattan. (And there’s his ferry, connecting them.)

Alfred Kazin, whose “A Walker in the City” (1951), heavily haunted by Whitman, remains the best book ever written about New York on foot, is all about going somewhere. Kazin uses walking as a metaphor for ambition and escape; his book is a study in how ambitious kids can ascend on foot when the provinces are just across the bridge. He was walking all the time because he was getting the hell out of Brooklyn and couldn’t afford a taxi. You could take the subway—Moss Hart, in “Act One,” writes of taking the subway—but Kazin prefers to walk, because the subway is one of the chief things he is escaping from. (When Hart escaped from Brooklyn, he took taxis, Broadway hits being more helpful in that line than Partisan Review pieces.)

As Whitman is walking through, Kazin is walking to and toward. He’s going somewhere with every step. (When he retreats back to Brooklyn, it is to see how far he’s gone.) If one were fanciful, one might say that the ghosts of the old Madison Square Garden walkers moved him—or, more bluntly, that the same cult of ambition and success that made Weston turn a small bar bet into a life’s career infects the dreams of the young writer. There’s no point in walking if you’re not getting ahead, even if the track you’re walking on turns out to be a perfect oval, taking you home.

Yet we find in both Whitman and Kazin a moment when the walker delights in the pure chance of walking in New York, what Kazin calls the walking that supplies “a happy, yet mostly vague and excited feeling.” Whatever else we walk to accomplish when we walk in New York, we always hope to randomize our too neatly gridded city existence. You go where your feet take you. Buses follow routes and subways have schedules, but someone on foot goes wherever he wants.

For a long time in the nineteen-eighties, I seemed to do nothing but walk around the city. I was blessed by several bits of new technology: by the first great age of the modern sneaker, for one, which allowed even the flat-footed to stride on what felt like cushioned air. And then the Walkman made every block your own movie. Just as the period of the first flâneurs falls between the rise of gas street lighting, which opened the city to twenty-four-hour circulation, and the onset of the automobile, which made cities loud again, so walking in the nineteen-eighties lay between the invention of the Walkman, which suddenly neutralized the noise of the automobile, and the onset of the iPhone, which replaced isolation-booth serenity with our now frantic forever-on-guardness.

You could walk anywhere. Saturday all day, Sunday all day, I’d tramp through the lower-Manhattan neighborhoods. The differences, architectural and social, among Tribeca and SoHo and the East Village, to name only contiguous areas, were distinct and vivid and nameable then: cast-iron buildings shading off into old egg- and paper-carton factories sweetly interrupted by small triangular parks, and edging over, as you walked east, into poor-law tenements that were just being reclaimed by painters. I would set off on a Saturday morning and walk all day, and achieve Kazin’s feeling of vague excitement, of unearned release, in a way that I have never felt before or since. SoHo in the eighties was the finest place for walking, not only architecturally beautiful but, by accident, still beautifully composed: illuminated sidewalks, glass orbs studding the iron paving to bring light to the basements below, still actually functioned, while the pioneering businesses were as chic and widely spaced as rocks in a Japanese garden—a single one-room restaurant with a cursive menu outside, a block of old businesses, a single charcuterie, a single deli for the whole neighborhood. At twilight, you walked, so to speak, from campfire to campfire, with inviting darkness in between.

Go back to SoHo now, and the streets seem stuffed, the glass sidewalks mostly paved over. There is little room to walk amid the shoppers. Walking for pleasure in cities is an occupation of the young. Only a very few older people of great vitality walk long in cities. What changes over time is not the city alone—some twentysomething is even now walking ample and hilly Brooklyn, and writing it down. What changes is us. We start walking outdoors to randomize our experience of the city, and then life comes in to randomize us. Children are the greatest of randomizers. They make walking unnecessary; we circle them to get the same effect of chance excitement. Their walking begins and ours ends.

People are made for walking, but we are not very good at it; our backs and arches, like querulous cabinet ministers, at first complain and then resign. Perhaps this is why the evolution of walking within a life falls into the same fated pattern as the old forgotten American sport. Like Weston, we begin peripatetic, walking where we will, then become circumambulant, walking around our kids or on an indoor track; we make a pass at a pilgrimage, like Dan O’Leary in Ireland, fail, and end up immobile. Footsore, we sit down and stay there. And then even our cells begin to go random on us, producing small failures of replication that mark our skin. Eventually, we leave the room feet first, hoping only to be remembered in someone else’s head, or by someone else’s hand. Without something happening in that higher human register where things are thrown, and thought, walking is strictly for the birds.

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker

Monday, July 24, 2017

We're not dead yet.




My position.
Why do you think that walking around in circles is so productive of creative thought, for some of us?
I read about an experiment that was conducted to conclude if when lost if people literally walked in circles!? Many people have preconceived ideas that when people are lost they walk in circles. In all actuality, the expression going around in circles means lost or confused. As before mentioned, Anglo-American minds tend to be peripatetic. Ironically enough, our minds are always walking or preoccupied whether it’s consciously or unconsciously. In order to answer the question of whether people who are lost walk in circles in the literal sense, the researchers removed the all the structured designs that could influence directions such as sidewalks, highways, and water sources from the equation. In order to observe people and their natural sense of direction, much of the research was conducted in desert. In the expression, “walking in circles” people are trying to express or explain where they are at mentally without a map or perhaps they have a map but don’t know how to decipher it. During the research, the weather proved to be an important variable. On cloudy days, when the sun or moon was hidden, the participants literally walked in circles. In fact, they walked in small circles, only a few hundred yards across. Ironically the article questions the reader to imagine how they would feel if they were lost in the Sahara Desert and couldn’t get further than a quarter mile from where they started. So, to answer the second question, why do you think walking around in circles is so productive of creative thought, for some of us. I believe that when in we are alone or secluded im a cloudy place feeling lost and confused that our imaginations prove to be more creative. The produce a better sense of direction especially, the second time around. The more times you circle, the more you feel as if it could be your last time around. I believe that when you feel lost or confused emotionally that is important that you take time to get a map or a hold on yourself. Without direction, it is very likely that you could find yourself walking in circles. In natural selection, in some cases, people who have been lost before in life make the best examples. Some of our most talented artist perform their most noted pieces when they are cloudy, lost, confused, or preoccupied with walking in circles. Walking in circles helps us to create a energetic force within ourselves. We could be viewed as a walking windmill. We have the potential to create energy just in our direction in life. Hypothesis: without meaningful clues for navigation, our brains may latch onto subtle, misleading cues in our environment—perhaps the slope of the ground, or the direction of the wind—in order to pick a direction. Works for me.
Joshua Ledford

A lagniappe for The Sandwalk Adventures


When I started reading The Sandwalk Adventures by Jay Hosler, I was unprepared for the lagniappe (Cajun for a little something extra) I received. I enjoyed learning about Jay’s pathway from doodler to a published cartoonist as an undergraduate at DePauw University and in graduate school at the University of Notre Dame; there’s hope for me yet. I was familiar with Sandwalk from Dr. Oliver’s posts in an earlier course, but I was a little surprised that Jay had not actually visited the site.

As I read about Jay’s experience with Sandwalk, “I didn’t visit Darwin’s home or stroll along his sandwalk. Consequently, I have neither visual reference material nor the context of experience from which to draw the sandwalk scenes. Things looked bleak for my attempts at visual authenticity until I found a terrific web page called AboutDarwin.com (this was my extra treat). Among a wide array of fun Darwin stuff, this site has a photo stroll around the sandwalk.”[1] If he had visited it, I might have not taken the next step of accessing the site which led me to another link, “Recent addition – Darwin’s burial:” What captured my attention was the statement about the relationship of Darwin’s tomb to Sir Isaac Newton’s. On further research, I saw a photo of Darwin’s tomb with a birthdate of “Born 12 February 1809” and I remember how Henry James stressed the importance of observation and storing up memories for future use. Somewhere deep in my mind a little part of that memory came alive.

I should have made this connection earlier but I realized that here was a unique Anglo-American connection that is seldom if ever mentioned. On that exact day and year, a young American boy was born. Like Darwin he had an avid curiosity. He was an insatiable reader who read by candle light. He knew Shakespeare so well that he could question an actor about the appropriate use of a pause on a particular part of a play. His favorite poet was Robert Burns from Scotland. He was a quiet humble man, a brilliant lawyer with a great wit and an incredible debater. He was criticized for not being a member of any church yet Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States.

I reflected on the coincidence of the place of their births; it is 3,940 miles from Shrewsbury, England to Hodgenville, Kentucky. I thought about their educations, Lincoln a self-taught lawyer, Darwin a self-taught scientist. I wonder if The Origin of Species crossed the Atlantic in time for Lincoln to read it before the Civil War began. I think they would have enjoyed each other’s company. Lincoln would have been fascinated with Darwin’s collections and might have even provided him with some objects from America. I think Lincoln would have asked probing questions and helped Darwin in preparing his rebuttals to his opponents, because I believe Lincoln would have agreed with Darwin’s conclusions. Thanks to Dr. Oliver, Jay, and The Sandwalk Adventures for opening that door for me to think about this possible relationship.



[1] Jay Hosler, The Sandwalk Adventures (Columbus, Ohio: Active Synapse, 2000), 137.