Friday, June 30, 2006

Walking Home

I took a bunch of pictures of my walk from the archives to the hotel yesterday. Don't worry- I won't post all of them! I tend to remember walks that I make frequently. Years later, I'll be falling asleep, and remember the walk around my grandparents' house that I made as a child. I think this is probably normal. My father often dreams about the walk around our old house.

Sometimes, I think it would be nice to make the same walk every day for twenty years or so. Imagine how much you would learn about that one stretch of the world. Eventually, you would know all of its nuances, its history and its hidden corners. Your knowledge might expand to include how that street fits into the life of the town, or how traffic moves along the road. You might gain insight into travel in general, or how we experience the world phenomenologically. Imagine the great unwritten books there are about solitary walks. Of course, there are many great written books about this- my favorite being Rousseau's. But, imagine how many walks there are that have been unrecorded and all the tiny little epiphanies that have come on long strolls. Maybe this is what scholarship is at heart- the accumulated insights made through our constant and patient solitary walks through the same books over the course of years.

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